2.2- 



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{LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.; 

# UNITED STATES OP AMERICA. Jj 



RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 



RELIGIOUS PROGRESS; 



DISCOURSES 



ON THE 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 



BY 

WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS. 



The morality of the Bible excepted, there has never appeared an ethical system — oriental or 
western, which might not fairly be described as a splendid enormity — or a glittering fragment, 
which owed all its value to the spoliation of some spurned and forgotten qualities. — Isaac Fat/lor. 

Praesens quisque gradus subsequentem parit et faciletn reddit ; subsequens priorcm temperai 
ac perficit. — Bengel. 



BOSTON: 
GOULD AND LINCOLN, 

59 WASHINGTON STREET. 

1 853. 




\jA : 



6°^ 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1350, by 

WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS, 

in the Clerk's Office for the (Southern District of New York. 




THOSAS B. SMITH, STEitEOTYPER, 
2IC( WILLIAM STREET, X. Y. 






TO 

ELI SUA TUCKER, D.D., 

OF CHICAGO, 

THESE LECTURES, PREPARED AT HIS SUGGESTION,. 

AND PUBLISHED, BY HIS REQUEST, 

ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED 

BY HIS ERIEND AND BROTHER. 

New York, October, 1850. 



PREFACE. 

The following Lectures were originally prepared for the pul- 
pit, and delivered to the peopie of his charge by the author. 
In a time, when the eyes of the nations are so generally strained 
towards the undefined and glowing horizon of the Future, and 
when the cry of " Progress" has awakened alike so much .of soli- 
citude and of hope, it seemed not unfitting that a Christian pastor 
should call his hearers to consider the elements and the laws 
of that higher moral progress stretching into eternity, of which 
the gospel of Christ witnesses, and for which the grace of God 
alone qualifies us. It was the belief of some of his hearers, that 
the reflections thus presented might find readers. To the favor 
of that God whose blessing alone can give these imperfect 
sketches acceptance oriisemlness, they are commended. 

W. R. W. 

New York, October, 1350. 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

LECTURE I. — Religion a Principle of Growth, . 13 

II. — Faith its Root, 37 

III.— Virtue, 60 

IV. — Knowledge, .80 

V. — Temperance, ■ . . . . . . 104 

VI. — Patience, 134 

VII.— Godliness, 160 

VIII. — Brotherly Kindness, . . . .182 
IX.— Charity, 206 

Appendix, 237 



and beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith 
virtue ; and to virtue knowledge ; and to knowledge tem- 
perance ; and to temperance patience; and to patience 
godliness; and to godliness brotherly kindness; and to 
brotherly kindness charity. 



LECTURE I. 

RELIGION A PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH. 



" ADD TO YOUR FAITH " 

2 Peter, i. 5 



Our age is writing " progress" on its banners, 
and sends along the benches of its schools, and the 
ranks of its combatants, as the watchword of the 
times : " Onwards." It bids us to forget the things 
that are behind, as incomplete and unsatisfactory, 
and to press toward those which are yet before us. 
"We believe that the gospel, and it alone, adequately, 
and to the full content of the heart, meets this 
deeply-seated craving of our times. Religion is a 
principle of perpetual progress. Not that it distends 
and pieces its old creed by constant innovations ; or 
retracts the severity of its early warnings and re- 
strictions ; or makes Fashion its Sinai. Not that it 
is the docile handmaid of Philosophy, or the con- 
tented retainer and serf of worldly rulers, wearing 
their livery, taking their wages and orders, and act- 
ing merely as a higher branch of their police, — a 
spiritual constabulary force. If it grew thus with 
the growth of secular systems and governments, it 
must on the other hand share in their decay, and 



14 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

perish in their fall, like a parasitic plant blasted by 
the death of its sturdier supporter. 

But setting before us, as the great end of our ex- 
istence, and as the only perfect model of moral excel- 
lence, the Infinite Jehovah, it requires, and it also 
ministers an ever-growing conformity to Him. And 
yet the Exemplar, thus to be approached, is ever 
above the highest soarings of our adoration, gratitude, 
and love. The elevation of our moral ascent towards 
him widens continually the horizon of our knowl- 
edge, and deepens the sense of our dependence and 
deficiency, — and earth and self are thus made con- 
tinually to dwindle. Mere terrene virtue becomes 
soon giddy and haughty, in proportion to the height 
of its real or imaginary flights. But the grace of 
Christ Jesus makes lowliness and self-renunciation to 
increase in proportion with the increase of true wis- 
dom and goodness. As it spreads more canvass to the 
breeze, it steadies with new and heavier ballast the keel. 
And the more humbly and deeply this grace is imbibed, 
the richer are its effects on the individual heart, and 
on the character and well-being of the nation, and on 
the movements and destinies of the age. Each new 
trial of its infinite resources displays still new depths 
of truth adequate to every emergency of every people, 
and of every time. The infatuation of its enemies 
disputes this fact. They would compliment the re- 
ligion of the cross into the grave, as an old-world ex- 
cellence, that is now obsolete ; or, others of them, hoot 
it out of sight as a detected and spent imposture. 
The remissness of its friends suppresses or obscures 



RELIGION A PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH. 15 

this £ame character of permanent development in true 
piety. But we suppose the times in which we live, 
eminently to need that Christians remember and act 
upon the principle, that their religion is a law of 
moral and interminable growth. " Grow in grace," 
is the apostle's injunction to all recipients of that 
grace. It is the secret and rule of personal reform, 
constantly advancing, and of social amelioration, en- 
franchisement and elevation. For the gospel alone it is 
that can meet the world's wants in their highest and 
fullest sense ; coming to right the wronged, and to 
guide the darkling, and to relieve the wretched, and 
to uplift the down-trodden. Compared with its high 
aims, the loftiest quarry of earthly ambition is but 
low and poor. The saint wins victories that an Alex- 
ander might have coveted in vain, for better is he that 
ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city. And the 
negro, who in the low, dark slave-hut, breathes out 
confidingly his departing soul, trusting the Saviour, 
and entering heaven, has a glory which all his armies 
and all his conquests would of themselves fail to give 
to the expiring Napoleon. 

This trait in the gospel, — its character as a prin- 
ciple of steady and indefinite growth, and of limitless 
advancement, — needs to be pondered. Our business is 
now indeed, not so much with the influence of this re- 
ligion on the community, as on the individual heart 
and character. But the individual elevated, uplifts 
necessarily the family and state and age of which he 
forms a part, and in which he is a necessary and vital 
element. There is much in the present condition of 



16 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

the churches, and muoh in the present aspect of the 
world, that makes this progressive energy of Chris- 
tianity, a lesson needing now to be especially urged by 
the teachers and heeded by the disciples of this faith. 
The church, we said, needs in this age, to be kept 
in mind of the great truth, that there remains yet 
much land to be possessed, not only as the common 
heritage of the faithful, but as the personal allotment, 
and homestead, so to speak, of each one of the faithful. 
The churches, re-discovering a long neglected duty, 
are now attempting to evangelize the heathen. It is 
an age of Missions. The islands of the Pacific have 
heard the cry after the lapse of eighteen centuries, 
that our earth has been honored and blessed by the 
coming of a Divine Redeemer. China has shuddered 
to see the long dominion of her Confucius and her 
Boodh invaded by the gospel of Jesus the Nazarene. 
The Shasters of Braminism find their sacred Sanscrit 
tongue employed, by the diligence and fidelity of mis- 
sionary translators, to utter the oracles of that One 
True Grod, who will banish from under the heavens 
which they have not made, and which He has made, 
all the hundred thousand gods of the Hindoo Pan- 
theon, with all the other idols of the nations, however 
ancient and however popular. The tinglings of a new 
life from on high seem, along the coasts of Asia and 
of Africa, shooting into nations that Paganism held for 
centuries senseless and palsied. Is not Ethiopia soon 
to be, as the prophetic eye of the Psalmist long ages 
ago saw her, stretching out her hands unto Grod ? 
But whilst each Christian church, each band of 



RELIGION A PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH. 17 

spiritual disciples, in lands long evangelized is thus 
lengthening the cords of her tent to take in the Gren- 
tiles under its broad canopy, she must in consequence, 
and as it were in counterpoise, of the extension, 
strengthen her stakes at home, to bear the increased 
tension and the extended shelter. Her supports must 
be proportionately augmented at home, by a deepen- 
ing piety and a sturdier vigor of principle in her 
discipleship, or the work will soon come to a stand 
abroad. A sickly and bedwarfed Christianity here 
will not furnish the requisite laborers, or the needful 
funds. Expansion without solidity will bring upon 
our Zion the ruin of the arch unduly elongated and 
heavily overloaded. Christendom itself must be more 
thoroughly Christianized, before Heathendom will re- 
linquish its old character and worship, and learn our 
creed and love our Saviour. Already the zeal and 
heroic sacrifices of some of our recent converts shame 
and should stimulate the comparative worldliness 
and lukewarmness of the churches that had first sent 
to them the missionary and the Bible. 

The churches have again gloried in the claim, that 
theirs has been an Age of Revivals, in which the 
work of conversion has been rapid, and the Divine 
Word has had its free course over the community. 
Far as these scenes and seasons of religious profiting 
have been, really and purely, the work of Grod's Spirit, 
they should call forth our praises to the grace that 
gave them, and our prayers and best efforts for their 
continuance and extension. But where man's work 
has undertaken to replace God's work, vigilance and 



18 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

fearless fidelity are needed on the part both of the 
ministry and the churches, lest God should be pro- 
voked to scorn the service and the worshippers, when 
censers and altars have been blazing with strange fire. 
And when, as often it has been, (rod's Spirit has 
really wrought, Christians need to keep in view, for 
themselves and for their new found brethren, the 
great truth that godliness is a life and a growth. In 
its beginning, indeed, a change, or turning, or con- 
version, the importance of which cannot be exag- 
gerated ; that change is but initial to an ever-growing 
conformity ; that turning, the entrance into a way to 
be patiently travelled ; and that conversion, the pas- 
sage from an earthly-mindedness which went ever 
downward, into a heavenly-mindedness which as ne- 
cessarily mounts evermore upward. The church must 
not allow herself to be satisfied with suspicious, or at 
best but superficial evidences of conversion ; and to 
be contented by accounting an increase of members, 
however won, and however taught, necessarily an in- 
crease of her strength. The church is to be, indeed, 
to those whom a true regeneration has made the babes 
of Christ's household, a nursery, full of provident ten- 
derness, and patient forbearance : but it is to be also, 
for its members of varied advantages and longer date, 
something more than this \ — a camp no less than a 
nursery. The trainers of God's sacramental host may 
not always be employed in feeding and swathing ; and 
although the new-born babe is to desire the sincere 
milk of the word, the more advanced disciples are re- 
buked by the apostle, if, after years, and oppor- 



RELIGION A PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH. 19 

tunities, and experience, they need to be " taught 
again the first principles of the oracles of Grod, and 
are become such as have need of milk and not of 
strong meat — unskilful in the word of righteous- 
ness ;" # and not " going on unto perfection ;"t when 
" for the time" spent in Christian profession and un- 
der varied religious nurture, they " ought to be 
teachers ;"$ masterly instructors of others, rather than 
feeble neophytes in the faith. 

It is, again, a memorable fact in the present po- 
sition of Christ's people, that the age is one of his- 
torical research. The religious controversies of our 
times seem to transfer themselves into that historic 
field. The battle with the enemy at the gates soon 
shifts its scene to the graves of the fathers, and the 
monuments of the old Past. There is, on the part of 
the favorers and of the opposers alike of spiritual re- 
ligion, an anxious tendency to inquire into the creeds 
and the deeds of the forefathers. A D'Aubigne is 
nVhtinsr over again the old battles, and re vi vino- the 
forgotten watchwords of the Reformation, by his 
graphic portraiture of the men and the events of that 
stirring era. The Puritan Fathers are beginning to 
know the honors of a partial resurrection, as our age 
is disinterring and relieving' them from the foul cere- 
ments in which they were enwrapped, and the lying 
epitaphs under which they were buried, by the lewd 
and godless age that immediately succeeded them. 
As we look on the stalwart, spiritual proportions of 
these ancient worthies, Christians of our own day seem* 

* Heb. v. 12-14. f Heb. vi. 1. \ Heb. v. 12, 



20 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

convicted of comparative degeneracy. With larger 
means, and wider opportunities, we appear to accom- 
plish less than did these devoted men. As we look at 
their writings so voluminous and rich, and at their 
toils so varied and incessant, their fierce and absorb- 
ing conflicts, and their far-reaching and still-brighten- 
ing influence, we seem to ourselves like mere infants 
in the tribes of Israel, when handling, in wonder and 
despair, the sword of Groliath, and remembering how a 
David wielded it against its stout owner, or when 
touching the bedstead of Og, king of Bashan, that 
was nine cubits long ; — a dwindling race who may not 
wear the armor, or renew the victories of those who 
have preceded us. And yet what were the Puritans, or 
the Reformers even, to the primitive Christians ? The 
honor and memorial of an Owen, a Bunyan, or a 
Baxter, a Samuel Rutherford, a John Knox, a Simon 
Menno, a Latimer, a Calvin or a Luther, pale beside 
the story of the fishermen apostles, who cheered by no 
precedents, and without the furniture of learning, or 
wealth, or numbers, stood forth confronting the dark 
Sanhedrim, and lifting at the foot of Csesar's throne 
an unblenched brow, and delivering before Pride and 
Might a cheerful testimony that faltered not, even 
whilst they heard the roar already of the lions which 
in the dens of the amphitheatre were awaiting their 
Christian victims, and whilst they saw the ruddy 
glare of those martyr fires even then closing the 
earthly existence of so many of their meek fellow 
confessors. To complete their work, and to gather in 
the full fruits of that covenant, of which thev seized 



REL-IGION A PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH. 21 

the first ripe ears only, we need their spirit. Their 
memory is a summons. And thus, we say, the his- 
tories of the past, as they are in our times awakening 
new interest and study, challenge it of the churches, 
that they become more than they now are, full of 
piety and mighty in faith, and more closely conformed 
to what their godly forerunners were, firm in trust, 
and valiant in deed, — fearlessly defying man, because 
simply relying on Grod. 

2. And if, from the peculiar state and needs of the 
churches, we turn to review the present aspect of the 
tvoi'ld, we seem to discover similar reasons, why the 
churches should not, now at least, overlook the fact, 
that the gospel is, to its obedient disciples, a principle 
of continuous advancement, a law of expansion and 
moral elevation. 

The world, falsely or with justice, is shouting its 
own progress, and promising in the advancement of 
the masses, the moral development of the individual, 
It is an age of eager and rapid discovery in the Phys- 
ical Sciences. The laws and uses of matter receive 
profound investigation, and each day are practically 
applied with some new success. But some of the 
philosophers thus busied about the material world, 
seem to think that the world of mind is virtually a 
nonentity. As Geology scratches the rind of our 
globe, some are hoping to dig up and fling out before 
the nations a contradiction to the oracles of the earth's 
Creator ; and to find a birth-mark on the creature 
that shall impeach the truth of its Maker's registers 
as to its age and history. Others, in the strides of 



22 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

Astronomy along her star-paved way, hope to see her 
travel beyond the eye of the Hebrew Jehovah, and 
bringing baek from her far journey a denial of the 
word that His lips have uttered. Yet Physical Sci- 
ence can certainly neither create nor replace Moral 
Truth. The crucible of the chemist cannot disin- 
tegrate the human soul, or evaporate the Moral Law. 
The Decalogue, and the Sermon on the Mount ; Con- * 
science and Sin ; the superhuman majesty and purity 
of Christ ; the Holy Ghost, and the Mercy Seat, would 
remain, even if a new Cuvier and another Newton 
should arise, to carry far higher and to sink far 
deeper, than it has ever yet done, the line of human 
research ; and even if these new masters of physical lore 
should blaspheme where the older teachers may have 
adored. Some claim that Revelation must be recast, 
to meet the advances in Natural Science. They over- 
look the true limitations, as to the power and pre- 
rogatives of mere Material Knowledge. And what are 
the new and loftier views of man's origin and destiny 
which these reformers propose to substitute for those 
views which they would abolish ? On the basis of a few 
hardy generalizations upon imaginary or distorted facts, 
and by the aid of some ingenious assumptions, a sys- 
tem is excogitated that is to strip the race of immortal- 
ity, conscience and accountability ; and that represents 
us as but a development of the ape, to be one day su- 
perseded by some being of yet nobler developments than 
our own, and who will have the right to rule and kill 
us, as we now rule and kill the beasts of the forest. 
And is it thus, that Philosophy reforms upon the 



RELIGION A PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH. 23 

Bible ? No — in the endeavor to out-grow Revelation, 
it has but succeeded in out-growing reason and bruti- 
fying humanity. No — let science perfect yet more 
her telescopes, and make taller her observatories, and 
deeper her mines, and more searching her crucibles ; 
all will not undermine Jehovah's throne, or sweep out 
of the moral heavens the great star-like truths of 
Revelation, and least of all the Sun of Righteousness. 
God's omniscience is never to be ultimately brought 
down to, and schooled by man's nescience, as its last 
standard and test. The last and greatest of the 
world's scholars will, we doubt not, be among the 
lowliest worshippers, and the loudest heralds of the 
crucified Nazarene. The gospel is true — true in- 
tensely, entirely and eternally : and all other and in- 
ferior truth, as it shall be more patiently and thorough- 
ly evolved, will assume its due place and proportion, 
as buttressing and exalting the great, pervading, con- 
trolling and incarnate Truth — Christ the Maker, the 
Sovereign, the Upholder, and the Judge, no less than 
the Redeemer of the world. 

But besides these advances in physical science, our 
age is one of wondrous political revolutions. Beside 
the oldest thrones of Europe, where successive genera- 
tions had slept in contented bondage, kissing and gild- 
ing their hereditary fetters, the cry of Progress, and 
Change and Freedom has been raised. Is the de- 
liverance promised now to be won, or to be again 
baffled, and yet to be long delayed ? The believer ex- 
pected change, long before the political agitator pro- 
claimed it ; and continues patiently to await it, long 



24 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

after the foiled revolutionist may have despaired of its 
coming. The Christian has seen in the Bible of his Grod 
the pledge of a Millennium. He has read in the sure 
omens and thick-coming tokens of (rod's providence, the 
signs of its gradual march of approach, often most rapid 
where most noiseless. And in this age of political agita- 
tion, of seething eagerness, and of tumultuous and an- 
archical hope, should not the gospel be announced with 
new boldness, and embraced with greater tenacity by 
all those who have long known it ? For that gospel 
proclaims the great principle, so reasonable, so right- 
eons, and yet so generally overlooked, that to precede 
and sustain national progress, there must be in- 
dividual progress, — and that, to give it permanence 
and worth, a moral change must underlie the civil 
and social change. Need it be again wrought out to 
a dreadful and bloody demonstration, — that truth — so 
often and cruelly illustrated in the history of revolu- 
tions, that 

" The bad rebel, but never can be free ;" 

that a sinner must by God's grace subdue himself and 
his own corruptions, to obtain the subjugation of his 
worst tyrants ; — that the truest and most brutish serf- 
dom is the bondage of evil principles and unholy 
habits, or that very " rehabilitation of the senses" in 
which, some in the old world, " filthy dreamers, defil- 
ing the flesh,"^ have proclaimed, as the hope of the 
race, what would be really the carnival of hell ? A 
nation, who are all drudges and dupes of Satan, can- 

* Jude 8. 



RELIGION A PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH. ZQ 

not be a nation of patriots and freemen. The salt 
necessary to preserve a people from moral putridity is 
lacking in them. Conscience, — relieved from the 
guilt and dominion of Sin, under the sprinkled blood 
of the Redeemer, and the regeneration of the Holy 
Ghost, the Renewer, — is to become, when thus itself 
emancipated, the grand emancipator of the nations, 
supplying to them alike the needful impulse, and the 
necessary restraints. Citizens would men be, and not 
serfs ? Citizens let them be ; yet let them recollect 
that the citizen as well as the serf is a mortal and a 
sinner, and needs an atonement with pardon for his 
guilt, a Comforter with solace for his inevitable woes, 
and a resurrection ministering peace to his death-bed, 
and assuring a good hope for his eternity beyond the 
tomb. Let states, and the helmsmen of states re- 
member, that there is a governor on high, " higher 
than they," no despot and no changeling, whose law 
they must ponder and obey, for it overrides their legis- 
lation, and whose sovereign favor they must invoke ; or 
else their freedom is an unblest impossibility, — impos- 
sible even were it to such godless states a blessing, and 
unblest even were it to such godless states a possibility. 
It is again, even in lands and governments where 
political revolution is not needed or is not desired, an 
age of social reform. And in such a time, when the 
operatives, the proletary class, to use a word of 
French thinkers, the men living on the day's wages, 
the laborious and the begrimed, the doers of hard and 
honest work, are crying out because of the long neg- 
lect and cruel oppression which they deem them- 

2 



26 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

selves to have endured on the part of their richer 
brethren, — is it not especially the season, when alike 
all those who seek and all those who dread such 
changes, should study, in the scriptures emanating 
from the Former and Ruler of Society, man's duties 
to man, and his obligations to his God ? The law of 
human brotherhood is there illustrated as no where 
else, spread as it is not only over Christ's teachings, 
but enforced and exemplified by Christ's sacrifice. 
There we see how the most radical of all reforms is 
also the most quiet and the most accessible to us all. 
It is the most radical, for it alters, to the inmost cen-. 
tre and to the outermost circumference, our relations 
to ourselves and to our race, to the universe, to eter- 
nity and to God. It is the most quiet, because it 
comes not with garments rolled in blood and the con- 
fused noise of the battle-field, but in the depths of the 
heart and with the still, small voice of God's Spirit, 
" not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith 
the Lord of Hosts." It is the most accessible, for it 
waits not for the will of majorities, the success 
of some favorite candidate, or the action of some busy 
cabal ; it stays not for protocol or senate, or cabinet, 
but in the solitude of our own closets, and in the 
secrecy of our own bosoms, it does its lonely, personal 
and uncontrollable work. It is the reform of our own 
individual lives, as growing out of a change sought at 
Christ's feet, and from God's almighty grace, and by 
the energy of His renewing Spirit, in our own in- 
dividual hearts. A freedom thus won, what tyran- 
nous invader shall ever reconquer ? A constitution 



R E L I G I O N A PRINCIPLE OF GIIOWT II. 27 

and legislation, revealed in the Divine Scriptures from 
heaven above, and accepted and rctranscribed. in the 
lie art of the regenerate convert on earth, secures his 
gravest interests beyond the reach of nil sublunary 
revolutions and mischances. Thus reformed and ele- 
vated, we shall not cherish extravagant expectations 
from the earth, or from the laws or societies of earth ; 
nor yet, whilst that God rules, shall we ever, in the 
darkest era, despair unduly of amelioration in those 
laws and of advancemement for those societies. 
Then, we shall know at once the dignity of Christ's 
freedmen, and the loyalty of Christ's servants ; and 
long, with a passionate affection, to make our breth- 
ren, however un amiable or brutified, the willing 
sharers of our blessed submission, and the eternal par- 
ticipants of our unspeakable immunities. But, under 
the lessons of this school, earthly liberty and property 
will be seen to have their duties quite as much as 
their privileges. Stewardship to heaven, and frater- 
nal sympathy for the race, will be seen graven on 
each charter of national emancipation, and on each 
distinguishing boon of our personal allotment. Then 
too, instead of resembling children, who think with 
their feet to reach, and with their hands to touch, the 
far rainbow and the ever-receding horizon, we shall 
find our Saviour's instructions giving us just and 
limited hopes, far as earth and man are concerned, 
and transferring for us to eternity and to heaven those 
desires and anticipations which nought but eternity 
and heaven can truly satisfy. There will be social pro- 
gress, then ; but it will be sober, and considerate, and 



28 



RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 



self-restrained ; not demanding the impossible, and 
not fretting at and fighting against the inevitable. 
Sickness, Want and Sorrow, what political revolution, 
or what social reform shall ever utterly obliterate, 
even in the case of the richest of mortals, until Christ 
come again ? And if Christ be ours, then earth's ills, 
transient and disciplinary, shall be transmuted into 
blessings. They shall furnish the crucible that is to 
separate and purge away our dross ; and will leave the 
gold to which that dross once so closely adhered, the 
brighter from the keen, brief flame that tried it, and 
the fitter for the service of that upper sanctuary, to 
which death shall soon transfer it. 

3. And now, having seen, how in the aspects, both 
secular and ecclesiastical, of our age, Christians were 
especially summoned to remember and evolve what of 
progression there^ was in their own faith, let us see 
how, in the inspired presentations of that faith, the 
fullest provision is made for man's moral growth, and 
perpetual elevation, alike when considered in his own 
personal isolation, and when regarded as a member of 
the communities of earth, or of that eternity and uni- 
verse lying beyond earth's narrow horizon. 

Were there no other precept of that tenor, the single 
utterance of our God : " Be ye therefore perfect, even 
as your Father which is in heaven is perfect,"* would 
be sufficient to show how a limitless growth and ex- 
pansion of our intellectual and moral stature was set 
before us in the gospel. That utterance was a part 
of the Sermon on the Mount. The morality there 

* Matt. y. 48. 



RELIGION A PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH. 29 

tan ght, and which lias smitten infidels with admira- 
tion, goes beyond — far beyond — that temporal and sec- 
ular order to which they would limit it. To man, the 
heir of immortality, it prescribes the law, and war- 
rants the hope, of an immortal progression ; — a pro- 
gression of which time is but the starting-point, and 
eternity the long career, and God, the unreached and 
ever-ascending goal of its endless and jubilant ascent. 
The mistakes and crude hopes of the irreligious, 
and the peculiar dangers and duties environing the re- 
ligious men and women of our times, should alike en- 
force this great principle. It is written, again and 
again, over the New Testament. The chief Master 
and Apostle of our profession prayed for his people 
that his joy might remain in them, and that their joy 
might be full, in keeping his commandments, and that 
thus their Father and His Father might be glorified, 
in their " bearing much fruit. "* Sanctified for their 
sake, He prayed " that they also might be sanctified 
through the truth." # Complete and final as was 
their justification, when once believing in Him, whose 
sacrifice and work made an end of sin, and brought in 
an everlasting righteousness ; their sanctification was 
but initial, and was to continue progressive, ascend- 
ing from grace to grace, and even when culminating 
in the invisible glory, it was even there to know 
through the long lapse of eternity an intenser glow of 
love, and to scan a widening horizon of knowledge, 
and to evolve a higher grade of holiness, as the dread, 
glad perfection of their Father God loomed on them 

* John xv. and xvii. 



30 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

more vastly, and shone on them more nearly and 
more clearly. And, in the light of his great Master's 
lessons, counting himself not to have attained, but 
struggling onward to apprehend that for which also he 
was apprehended and converted of his God, Paul 
bade Christians go onward and forward to perfection, 
and leaving the nursery, and its pattering by rote of 
elementary truths, he bade them proceed to the 
studies and attainments of a vigorous maturity in 
truth and holiness. So, he elsewhere compares the 
Christian to a vessel meet for the Master's use, only 
as it is properly kept, purged, and adorned. Now in 
the preparation of the vessels of the old sanctuary, 
there were stages of advance. The mould was pre- 
pared ; the ore was dug, broken, and sifted and mol- 
ten ; and the vessel, when cast, was chased by the 
graver's tool, and burnished,, and oftentimes cleansed. 
The casting of the soul bv faith into the mould of 
Christ and into the great doctrine of His atonement, 
now justifies the character of the true disciple, as 
really gold of the sanctuary. But many a lesson, and 
many a trial, are needed, in the way of sanctification, 
to prove, for that soul, its adaptation and meetness, as 
a vessel for the Master's use, in His lower and in His 
higher courts, as an urn or a censer, in which to store 
the manna of His testimonies, and to bear the flaming 
incense of His acceptable worship. There are stages 
in Christian attainment ; and one but prepares for an- 
other, and, without all, the Christian cannot be fully 
useful or perfectly blessed. And similar to Paul's 
teachings, is the teaching, in our text, of his fellow 



RELIGION A PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH. 31 

apostle, Peter. He sets before the astounded convert 
the high aim, and the large boon, of " all things that 
pertain unto life and godliness," and of becoming 
"partaker of the divine nature," — not surely, in 
aspiration after an equality with its incommunicable 
Deity ; — nor in Pantheistic, Boodhist absorption into 
its substance and Unity : but, in moral sympathy with, 
and ever-sTowinsr assimilation to its holiness : and in the 
enlarged participation of its informing Spirit ; and in 
still loftier exultation over its universal and inde- 
feasible Sovereignty. Then, having fixed the shrink- 
ing eye of the abashed and self-condemning worship- 
per on this blaze of insufferable brightness, as his 
Teacher and Pattern, his Light and Life, the apostle 
shuns, as no uninspired teacher could, what seems 
next an irretrievable fall into the lowest bathos, in 
his descent from the Throne thus surveyed, to the 
Footstool, where the convert is for the time to labor 
and serve. He accomplishes the transition, by un- 
rolling as it were from the feet and under the eye 
of that High Teacher, the life-long lesson for earth 
and for eternity, of each scholar in Christ's heavenly 
school. Having counteracted the awe that might 
crush the learner's spirit, by the grace that won and 
raised it, " whereby are given unto us exceeding 
great and precious promises, that by these ye might 
be partakers of the divine nature ;" and having stated 
their effect on the believing recipient, who by them 
will ^escape the corruption that is in the world 
through lust ;" he, once, the fisherman of the Gal- 
ilean lake, little conversant, we should suppose, with 



32 



RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 



themes high, and vast, and spiritual, launches out 
into a description of moral symmetry and spiritual ex- 
cellence, such as no sage of Greek or Oriental fame, 
and no Doctor of his own national Sanhedrim, ever 
even approached. The hand, once wont to grasp the 
clammy meshes of his net, or to scrape the scales from 
his finny prey, now guided in its use of the style, by 
God's own wisdom, engraves for all the churches of 
all succeeding time this charge : " And beside this," 
(as if, what had gone before were not large enough, 
and lofty enough, to blind the eye with excess of light, 
and overwhelm the panting, toiling intellect) — " be- 
side this, giving all diligence," (with no delay, with 
no drowsy effort, or half-hearted resolve, but in all 
promptitude, and with all energy, by every method, 
and with a relentless perseverance, undismayed, un- 
bailed, and untiring,) " giving all diligence, add to 
your faith virtue : and to virtue knowledge ; and to 
knowledge temperance ; and to temperance patience ; 
and to patience godliness ; and to godliness brotherly 
kindness ; and to brotherly kindness charity." And 
to this inventory of man's moral glory, fetched from 
God's throne and grace, he attaches the argument 
from gratitude, as due towards the Lord bestowing 
them : " For if these things be in you and abound, 
they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor un- 
fruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ." 
And to this he attaches the argument from shame, or 
the reproach else to be incurred of ignorance, forget- 
fulness and blindness : " But he that lacketh these 
things is blind, and cannot see afar off, and hath for- 



RELIGION A PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH. 33 

gotten that he teas purged from his old sins" And 
to this he attaches the argument from danger, and 
having before thins: back the veil from the face of the 
Supreme Throne, he tears now the covering from the 
mouth of the flaming pit, which awaits the plunge of 
the apostate : " Wherefore the rather, brethren, give 
diligence to make your calling and election sure; 
for if ye do these things ye shall never fall." 
And then to the arguments from gratitude, and from 
shame, and from danger, he appends, as the triumph- 
ant climax, the argument from hope : " For so an en- 
trance shall be ministered unto you abundantly into 
the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour 
Jesus Christ" 

4. And passing from the context, the peculiar 
phraseology of the text itself intimates the same great 
lesson. From the word " add," a heedless reader 
might infer, that all the graces thus clustered were in- 
dependent each of the other, and might be selected or 
omitted as each disciple saw fit ; and that a man 
might at least be safe in having but the first, though 
in his negligence lacking all the rest. But such is 
not the apostle's meaning. The word rendered in our 
excellent version, " add," is, as scholars tell us, a pe- 
culiar one, having no term in our own language that 
is its exact antitype and correlative. The Greeks, the 
people whose language Grod saw fit to employ in the 
New Testament, were accustomed in the solemn spec- 
tacles of their republics to employ choirs, of trained 
artists, numerous and costly. It was one of the 
honorable burdens, imposed at times upon some opu- 



34 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

lent private citizen, that lie should, as the offering and 
expression of his patriotism, furnish or supply, to the 
magnificent shows of the state, thess choirs at his 
own personal expense, hiring himself the musicians 
and others who composed the choir. The word de- 
rived from this custom, and which represented one 
so gratuitously contributing or ministering a band, or 
harmonious troop, is the term used both by Paul and 
by Peter, in the sense of minister, or furnish. It re- 
appears in this same chapter, at the eleventh verse, 
where the disciple is encouraged with the prospect of 
an abundant entrance at death into (rod's kins'- 
dom, being "ministered" unto him; or that G-od 
would " add" to him the full company of benefits 
arid joys that went to make a triumphant outgate 
from earth, and a magnificent entrance into Paradise. 
And in the text now before us, the older English 
translators, "Wycliffe, and the martyr Tyndal, and the 
martyr Cranmer, in their several versions have here, 
also, the word " minister" where our majestic, re- 
ceived version has put " add." Neither term, as we 
have said, nor any other single word supplied by our 
tongue, can reproduce the idea of the original Grreek. 
As recurring here, it implies that the believer is called 
upon to furnish not a single and isolated grace, but to 
supply, " adding" one to another, the whole consent- 
ing train, and harmonious, interwoven troop, the 
complete, sisterly choir of Christian graces. He is to 
look upon the one in this cluster of Christian ex- 
cellencies, as fragmentary and untuned without the 
others. The one grace is the supplement and comple- 



RELIGION A PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH. 35 

merit, indispensable to the symmetry and melody of 
all its sister graces. 

Now in this choir or train, Faith is the elder born, 
and upon it all these other graces depend. It alone 
justifies, but as the old theologians were fond of say- 
ing, not being 1 alone. It conies singly to the task of 
man's justification, but in the heart and life of the jus- 
tified man, it does not come as a solitary, building 
there its lonely hermitage. Faith enters there rather, 
as came Miriam when leading at the Red Sea the ex- 
ultant songs of her Hebrew sisters ; and a whole troop 
comes up at her feet : and whilst at the bar of Grod's 
law, when righteousness is demanded, she answers 
alone, and her plea is but one word, " Christ ;" into 
the earthly church and into the general assembly of 
heaven, she walks not unattended, but every other 
grace of the regenerate comes with her, bearing her 
train, and attesting her kingly descent from (rod. 
"When, then, the apostle bids us " add" to this faith, 
his intent is not that Faith is properly, in its concrete 
existence in the human heart as renewed by divine 
grace, an isolated principle, divisible from Yirtue, or 
from Charity, afterwards enumerated. "Where the last 
are utterly absent, Faith is unreal. The addition meant 
is not the mechanical superposition of one on the other, 
as the miser adds coin to coin, each distinct from the 
other, and every one perfect and complete apart ; or as 
the architect adds stone to stone in his edifice, each 
new block having no necessary affinity with those 
upon which it is laid. But we are to supplement the 
one grace of Christianity with the other, as one voice 



36 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

or performer in the trained choir requires the aid and 
addition of others, or, as the seed cast into the good 
soil, and drinking gladly the dew, and rain, and airs 
of heaven, adds to itself the root, and to the root adds 
the stem, and to the stem superadds the branches ; 
and then, naturally and by necessary growth, these 
branches are crowned with the twig and the leaflet, 
and the blossom, and the full-formed fruit : and then 
each part in that living choir, from the lowest root 
that buries itself below the sod, to the topmost leaf 
that quivers in the sunbeam, bears its share in the 
symmetrical life of the tree, and in showing forth the 
high praises of the God who planted, developed, and 
united that verdant and wavinsr monument of His 
skill. Religious life is, thus considered, the out- 
growth from faith implanted in the soul. True prog- 
ress is but the natural efflorescence, the budding and 
blossoming of a living belief of (rod's truth, as mani- 
fest in the various fruits of the Spirit, in benevolence 
towards man, and piety towards Grod, in usefulness on 
earth, and meetness for heaven. 



LECTURE II. 



FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN" LIFE. 



" ADD TO YOUR FAITH " 

2 Peter, L 5. 



When the Vatican issued the celebrated Bull Uni- 
genitus, the occasion of so many scandals, and of such 
fierce and protracted controversy, and in which it con- 
demned, as abounding with most portentous errors, 
the excellent commentary upon the New Testament 
of the pious Father Q,uesnel, it selected as one of 
those errors, a remark of the good Jansenist upon 
the chapter before us, that " Faith is the first of 
graces^ and the source of every other"* And yet 
what else than this very sentiment does the language 
of the apostle here suggest ? Faith is put by him 
first in order ; and is it not so put by Peter's Lord 
and Master, the chief Apostle and Bishop of our 
profession ? Has not our Saviour explicitly made the 
presence of faith the warrant of our salvation, and the 
absence of it the seal of our perdition ? " He that 
believeth on the Son hath everlasting life; and 
he that believeth not the Son shall not see life ; but 
the wrath of Grod abideth on him."t And with the 

* See Appendix A. f John, iii. 36. 



38 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

high importance thus assigned to Faith, in the theory 
of religion, considered as a system of doctrines, tallies 
the effect and power, in practice, of its presentation to 
the world, as the hinge of the sinner's justification or 
condemnation. The Reformers gave it this cardinal 
place and authority, and announcing to the startled 
nations the forgotten but primitive truth of Justifica- 
tion by Faith, the vast and deeply-rooted fabric of the 
Papacy vibrated to its inmost centre at the shock of 
their testimony. Our Protestant Missionaries preach 
it. To some speculative minds at home, it might 
seem but a metaphysical abstraction, which many of 
the Pagans are too ignorant and besotted to under- 
stand, much less to value. But how has it seemed to 
create an intelligence it had not found, and in how 
many a tribe has the heathen abjured, at this sound, 
his brutishness, and his idolatry, and his cannibalism. 
Its old miracles of power, and of moral exorcism, are 
repeated in our own times, and as it were beneath our 
very eyes. Nay, in your own hearts, have not many 
of you found its wondrous energy, to awaken hope, 
and yet to enkindle penitence ; and are you not your- 
selves the monuments that this principle it was, which 
first broke within you the dominion of sin, and the 
yoke of Satan, and whilst it taught you to build every 
plea on the grace of Christ Jesus, you found in that 
grace the bond of Duty strengthened within you, and 
fastened upon you, as the law, apart from faith in 
Christ, could never do it ? 

Of the principle, thus claiming the first rank in the 
earliest and in these latest teachings of the churches 



FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 39 

of Christ, and thus mighty in its influence, let us in- 
quire : 

I. What is this Faith ; 

II. Why it has assigned it, this priority in the 
Christian system ; and 

III. How, from the necessity of its nature, it be- 
comes a root of spiritual growth, and practical devel- 
opment. 

I. Faith is not, then, the mere hereditary and pas- 
sive acquiescence in Christianity as the religion of our 
country and of our forefathers. Nor is it a reception 
into the intellect merely, apart from the heart, of any 
creed however orthodox. Nor is it a mere enthusias- 
tic persuasion, without scriptural evidence, and un- 
sustained by the warrant and witness of the Holy 
Grhost, that God loves us personally. Nor is it, as the 
enemies of religion would persuade you, a blind, 
bigoted credulity, the creature and retainer of Priest- 
craft. The faith revealed in the Bible, in its tendency 
to sever from all human merits, and intercessors — 
from all earthly sacrifices and priesthoods — and to 
shut the soul up to a direct and personal appeal to 
Christ, and to an exclusive reliance upon the cross ; — 
and the Bible enjoining that faith, as the one con- 
dition and term of salvation ; — that faith and that 
Bible, we say, are the fellest and sternest foes of 
Priestcraft which the world has ever seen. 

Faith, in its widest sense, is trust or belief; confi- 
dence in the word, character or work of another. 
Though requisite in religion, it is as much requisite 
elsewhere. Human society in its whole framework is 



40 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

so held together ; and the kindreds, and amusements, 
and business of the world, are presenting to the most 
earthly-minded, continual images and intimations of 
that faith, which, when demanded of him by the 
church and by the Word of God, he may sometimes 
affect to regard as strange and unexampled. The 
generous confidence of soldiers in a tried and heroic 
leader, that enables them, in his company, to dare, at 
immense odds, all peril, and to pluck victory out of 
the teeth of death ; — the implicit confidence of his 
correspondents in a merchant of known means, and of 
proved integrity and sagacity, bidding them set a for- 
tune afloat on the credit of his mere signature ; — the 
trust of the voyager in the intelligence and vigilance 
of the navigator, to whose keel he commits his estate, 
and family, and life ; — the unshaken assurance of a 
friend in the worth and affection of one whom he has 
long known and intimately loved ; — and the quiet, 
serene and rooted trust of a wife or a child, in the 
husband or the parent to whom for years they have 
looked, and never looked in vain: — these are all but 
examples, in daily recurrence, of the use and the need , 
of the sweetness and of the power, of a reasonable 
faith and a well-placed trust. 

The faith of the gospel is something more than 
these, only as being trust in (rod. It is trust, as to 
matters of higher concernment, and upon better war- 
rant, and in a Greater and Better Being. It is a re- 
liance on His true testimony. It is not irrational, for 
it has overwhelming evidence, both intrinsic and ex- 
trinsic, that the testimony is really from Him. Yet 



FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 41 

much, declared and revealed by this Divine testimony, 
may jar on our prejudices, and wound our pride : and 
is received as true, because being His word, it must 
be true. If we received at His lips only what our 
own reason could first have predicted, or afterwards 
have fully explained and grasped, it would be vir- 
tually to impeach God's testimony, by treating Him 
as we treat a discredited witness, whose word we re- 
ceive only as far as it is corroborated by other, and in- 
dependent testimony. As the great theme of this 
divine testimony is Christ Jesus, the Incarnation of 
God for the redemption of man, Faith cannot truly 
receive that testimony without believing on Christ. 
That Christ true faith accepts as He, in this volume 
of His testimony, reveals himself, as being the 
God no less than the man, and as becoming the Sov- 
ereign no less than the Saviour of His people. The 
Socinian denies the first ; the Antinomian suppresses 
the last of these twin truths. But true faith wel- 
comes all, not attempting where God hath joined that 
man should put asunder. And as Christ came to ele- 
vate and free, to ransom and sanctify His subjects ; 
and finally to bring the prisoners of Hell into the pos- 
session of the immunities and joys of Paradise ; and 
gives even here the earnest of these eternal benefits ; 
true Faith, even for this present life, ennobles and 
liberates its votaries by bestowing upon them the first 
instalments of their coming and celestial inheritance. 
Instead of its being, as the bigots of scepticism (for 
Infidelity has its blind and bitter bigotry) represent it, 
a bandage for the eyes, and a manacle for the free 



42 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

hand, Faith is thus really, to the eyes of the soul, a tele- 
scope bringing near the far glories of Heaven : " the 
evidence of things not seen, and the substance of 
things hoped for." And it is, to the hand, a clue 
leading our steps out of the mazy dungeon of Sin, and 
through the labyrinth of Earth. It is a magnet 
pointing the voyager to his desired haven; the char- 
ter, to the criminal, of an undeserved and full pardon ; 
and the warranty and title deed, to the forlorn and 
homeless prodigal, of a rich, unfading and princely 
heritage, and of his welcome to a recovered home and 
a reconciled Father. Speaking, as does this divine 
testimony, of a Renewing Spirit no less than a Re- 
deeming Son of God, and describing as this word does 
that Spirit as witnessing with the Scripture, and of 
Christ, and for Christ, to the prayerful and penitent 
learner, Faith receives too this testimony, and finds 
that Divine Spirit, aiding and answering prayer, ex- 
plaining and applying Scripture, and enabling the dis- 
ciple successfully to collate, if we may so speak, the 
parallel passages of (rod's record in the written 
volume, and of God's living inscription on the fleshly 
tablets of the heart, in the disciples' own conscience, 
and experience, and history. And as this Faith is 
trust in the truth of the ever Truthful Grod, it is high- 
est wisdom : as it is reliance on the Omnipresent, 
the Almighty, and the Everlasting Jehovah, it is the 
surest, the only safety. Expelling moral death, and 
becoming the inlet and channel of a restored inter- 
course with the Ever-living God, it brings life — eter- 
nal life. 



FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 43 

As being enwrought by the Divine Spirit, the glory 
of it and its first origin belong to Grod, the Father of 
Lights and author of every good and perfect gift. 
But working, as that Divine Spirit docs, upon man 
not as mere passive matter, but as an active and in- 
telligent soul, it is man's act under God's agency : 
(rod working in us to will and to do, of his own good 
pleasure. And as the act is reasonable, and the tes- 
timony trustworthy, and the evidence overwhelming, 
and the summons universal, our failure to believe is 
irrational and inexcusable. Unbelief is our sin and 
our ruin. Contemplating the work of man's salvation 
from the point, whence Paul in the Epistle to the Ro- 
mans regards it ; (rod's effectual calling, and, yet be- 
fore that, His divine foreknowledge and predestina- 
tion, go before that Faith, in which man is justified. 
" For wdiom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate 
to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he 
might be the first-born among many brethren. More- 
over, whom he did predestinate, them he also called : 
and whom he called, them he also justified."* But 
considering the Christian graces, in the order of their 
implantation and manifestation, in the regenerate 
soul, Faith stands forth as the first-born of those 
graces. 

II. And should it be asked, why has it this priority 
in the Christian system ; we answer, it may well oc- 
cupy this place of precedency in the scheme of man's 
salvation, for various reasons. Four might be named; 
one derived from mail's past history, another, from 
* Rum. viii. 29, 30. 



44 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

the relations of God and man, yet another from God's 
great goodness, and the last, from man's present, 
besetting sin. Man's history required it. Unbelief, 
the opposite of faith, had the primary place in man's 
fall and perdition. When the Tempter instilled sus- 
picion, as to the Divine veracity, into the minds of 
our first parents, then, as to them, " Sin was con- 
ceived," and soon " it brought forth death," and let in 
all our woe. They, who had originally known good 
only and fully, knew thenceforward " good and evil," 
the one by its loss, and the other by its cruel and con- 
stant presence. It occupies the first place, again, 
from the nature respectively, of God and man. He, 
as the Infinite and Omniscient, knows much which 
man, as the finite being of limited faculties and ex- 
istence, can know only through His divine testimony. 
The past of our original history, and the dim future 
of our final destiny, we can learn only from (rod's 
revelations. And going beyond our own history and 
destiny, what could we learn, as to the counsels and 
purposes of God concerning other orders and hierar- 
chies of his creatures, and concerning other worlds of 
His universe, except as He, in His sure Oracles, 
vouchsafed to disclose, with more or less of clearness, 
the edge and outline, so to speak, of those vast coun- 
sels, those sublime and indefeasible purposes? Now I 
till we have faith we cannot take in these teachings. 
Again, God's unutterable tenderness and goodness 
have assigned to Faith this post of precedency. The 
babe, yet but a prattler, may have full trust and con- 
fidence in the parent who cherishes and fondles it. 



FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 45 

Before it can reason, or even speak, it may believe in 
its father and mother. Had God required great tal- 
ents, or rich attainments, or profound study ; had He 
said to the inquirer : Be a Paley, a Butler, a Chal- 
mers, and build up thy salvation by the study of 
many volumes beneath the midnight lamp; where 
had hope been for the young, the ignorant, the bar* 
barian, — in fact for the masses of the race ? Bat 
He, whose kind purpose it was to bring " many sons" 
unto salvation, in love for the race whom, after all 
their provocations, He consented not to abandon, ap- 
pointed not Learning, not Philosophy, not Wisdom, 
but Faith to be the handmaiden keeping the gate of 
everlasting life. And man's besetting sin, — the pride, 
which, after all the deep descent and all the foul wal- 
lowings of the Fall, clings so persistently to him, how- 
ever degraded and brutified, — made it fitting, that the 
mode of his acceptance before God should be one that 
allowed no occasion for boasting. Had merit or ser- 
vice, intellectual or moral, been the plea, the presen- 
tation of which would win our pardon, and open to us 
Heaven, then man's obstinate infirmity, the pride 
that first precipitated him out of Eden, would have 
been fostered and confirmed. But what shadow of 
merit can we claim, in believing the true testimony 
of a truthful and trustworthy witness ? Peremptorily 
and finally God thus excluded all self-righteousness. 
Or, as Paul argues, it is of faith and not of works, 
that before God no flesh may boast. And so also, 
that before God no flesh may despair. The vilest 
may repent and believe, and accept free forgiveness. 



46 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

The best must repent and believe, and accept free for- 
giveness. No immorality is too low, and foul, for this 
righteousness of Faith to reach : no morality is too 
high and pure, that it should need this righteousness 
of Faith, for the concealment of its deficiencies and 
the pardon of its demerits. The sinner fleeing to the 
city of refuge, must take the cross on his way, and 
bow, in faith, before Him who hanging thereon made 
an end of sin, and brought in an everlasting righteous- 
ness. 

III. But will not a scheme of salvation, thus free 
and indiscriminate, break down all virtue, and " the 
dignity of human nature," and abolish law, and holi- 
ness, and truth ; and give up the church militant and 
triumphant to the incursion of the offscourings of our 
race? So, in all ages, objectors have argued. But 
the Providence of Grod, and the history of the 
Churches, have sufficiently answered and exploded 
these cavillings. The faith that justifies, is implanted 
by a transforming Spirit, and reconciles to a Holy and 
sin-hating Father, and unites to a Redeemer, detest- 
ing and destroying iniquity. He came to save His 
people from their sin ; not as Antinomianism virtually 
travesties it, to save them in their sins : — to destroy the 
works of the devil ; not to gild, and canonize and 
perpetuate them. Whilst Faith then accepts pardon 
as (rod's free gift, it accepts as the inseparable con- 
comitants of that pardon, penitence for sin ; gratitude 
to the G-iver ; ingenuous love ; adoption into the 
household of Grod ; and assimilation to the Elder 
Brother, — the head of that household. While the 



FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 47 

energy of His righteousness justifies, the energy of the 
Renewing and Sealing Spirit sanctifies. 

From the necessity of its nature, the implanted 
Faith becomes a root of spiritual growth, and a prin- 
ciple of practical development. For Faith must take 
a whole Christ, in the entireness of his offices, as the 
Sovereign no less than as the Redeemer ; and take a 
whole Scripture, in its precepts, its solemn warnings, 
and its awful denunciations, no less than in its prom- 
ises, free, full and benignant ; and take a whole Gfod, 
in the august fulness of His perfections, the Jealous 
G od, and the Avenger, whose eyes are too pure to look 
upon iniquity, as well as the Gracious and the Long- 
suffering, who will not have any to perish. Faith 
does not assume to dissect away the Divine Justice 
from the Divine Mercy. It was a fraudulent claimant 
to the sacred title of mother, who at the throne of 
Solomon, asked the division of the living child. And 
it is but a spurious Faith, and a forged Christianity, 
that would hew apart, at the foot of the Mercy Seat, 
the living Christ, and taking his grace, leave His holi- 
ness. 

In its earlier stages, faith is generally but feeble. 
That it should remain so, is not the will of Him who 
implants, who requires, and who sustains it. When 
our Lord rebuked his disciples, it was as those of 
"little faith," and so small did he regard it, in its ex- 
isting measure as shown in their hearts and acts, that 
it did not equal the mustard-seed. Had they but 
even that scanty and petty degree of faith, they could 
remove mountains at a word, and fling their uprooted 



48 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

bulk into the seas. The Apostle Paul, on the other 
hand, in a later day of the dispensation, when the 
Spirit had been more largely poured forth, rejoiced 
over the Thessalonian Christians, in the increase, — 
the " exceeding" increase, of their faith, and that not 
in the case of a favored few only, but in their whole 
community. " We are bound to thank Grod always 
for you, brethren, as it is meet, because that your 
faith groweth exceedingly, and the charity of every 
one of you all toward each other aboundeth." # It is 
recorded to Abraham's honor, that he was " mighty in 
faith." And whilst all have not the actual attain- 
ment of the like might of trust in Grod, it is set before 
all, as alike their privilege and their duty. Those 
who have attained, are honored, and presented as pat- 
terns and incentives for the emulation of those who 
come after. " Being dead, they yet speak." It was a 
touching memorial to their comrade, the warrior of 
Breton birth, La Tour d'Auvergne, the first grenadier 
of France, as he was called, when after his death, his 
comrades insisted that, though dead, his name should 
not be removed from the rolls : it was still regularly 
called, and one of the survivors as regularly an- 
swered for the departed soldier : " Dead on the 
field." The eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews is such roll-call of the dead. It is the re^is- 
ter of a regiment, which will not allow death to blot 
names from its page, but records the soldiers who 
have, in its ranks, won honorable graves and long-abid- 
ing victories. Faith was the principle that wrought 

* 2 Thessal. ii. 3. 



FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 49 

in these ancient worthies of the church their prowess 
and their high achievements. And though dead to man 
on earth, they are yet "living unto Grod." We are to 
press forward in their steps, to emulate their might 
and glory, and to uphold and extend their conquests. 

1. From the nature of faith, and of the human 
mind itself, faith, where well placed, on a trustworthy 
object, must grow and strengthen by exercise and 
continual repetition. The friend with whom we have 
taken long and intimate counsel, who has lightened, 
by dividing, our sorrows, and heightened, by doubling 
them, our enjoyments, must occupy in our confidence 
a place such as no stranger can suddenly conquer. And 
God has so arranged the changes and tests of his provi- 
dence, that man needs daily to appeal afresh in the 
new emergencies of the new day, to the care, and skill, 
and truth of his Father on high. If such appeal be but 
made, the act becomes a rooted habit ; and he who, in 
earlier times, but cried, through tears, as he felt the 
waverings of a feeble faith, and the blasts of mighty 
temptation, " Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief," 
learns to adopt, in his later experience, the firm assur- 
ance of Paul, " I know in whom I have believed ;" or 
with the patriarch exclaims, " I know that my Re- 
deemer liveth." 

2. The growth set before our faith appears, again, 
from the character and structure of Scripture, the 
volume on whose testimonies faith fastens, and in 
whose rich pastures she must ever feed. Grod might 
have made it a book to be exhausted at one reading ; 
or a record of the Past, unavailing to the men of the 



50 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

Present ; or a mysterious outline of the Future, of lit- 
tle clearness or usefulness till the times of its fulfil- 
ment had come. Instead of this, it is a book of all 
times, full of the ancient Past, and the busy Present, 
and the dread or gorgeous Future. It has the simplest 
teachings interwoven inextricably with its most fathom- 
less mysteries ; and precept, and promise, and threat- 
ening, and history, and parable, and psalm, so grouped, 
that every taste may be gratified, and none sated and 
cloyed. A Newton, sitting down to its perusal, finds 
it still opening new depths of wonder and glory, the 
more prolonged and devout are his meditations upon it. 
The new convert, dazzled over its pages with the ec- 
stacy of his new-found hope, yet, cannot as deeply and 
ardently love and value it, as he will do when a gray- 
headed patriarch, years after, he turns afresh its won- 
drous leaves to adore the ever-full freshness of its les- 
sons, and to remember all the lights it has cast upon 
his weary pathway. It is the book not of an academic 
lustrum only, nor of a lifetime, but of generations. 
As centuries have rolled on, this august volume has 
notched on their calendar new fulfilments of its prophe- 
cies, new illustrations of its truthfulness, and new 
evidences that its authorship could come from none 
other than the Former of the worlds, and the Ruler of 
all centuries. Now, when Faith is presented with such 
a manual, not to be mastered in weeks or years, but 
still evolving new lights to the latest studies of the 
longest lifetime, does not the character and structure 
of the book proclaim the intent of Grod, that Faith 



FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 51 

should not sit down content with present attainments, 
and its as yet immature strength? 

3. And so too, the character of God Himself pro- 
claims the same great law of the constant growth of 
faith. " Acquaint thyself with Him and be at peace," 
is the demand of Reason, no less than Scripture. It 
is not in the mere exercise of his Sovereignty, but 
quite as much from the mere impulse of his mercy, 
that He requires the beings He has formed and en- 
dowed to seek him. Man has capacities and aspira- 
tions that the earthly, the perishable, the finite and the 
sinful can never satisfy. In tenderness to o.ur race, 
Grod commands them to seek in Himself, in the knowl- 
edge of His nature and will, and in communion with 
Him, those enjoyments that nought lower and less 
than Himself can furnish. We can easily conceive, 
in the lower orders of creation, how unhappy it were 
that a being of higher endowments and long duration, 
should be decreed to mate with, and hang upon one 
of much inferior nature, and of shorter date than it- 
self. If, for instance, the aloe, the plant of centuries, 
were fated to be the appendage and parasite of the 
ephemeron, the insect of a day, it would be doomed 
virtually to early and lonely widowhood by the un- 
timely decay of its idol, and the perfect inadequacy 
and early rottenness of its appointed prop. The soul, 
with its unrenounceable immortality, and its infinite 
aspirations, is such plant of the long centuries, an 
aloe of the eternities beyond this world. Did God 
permit man to accept as his supreme standard, and 
object, and end, aught finite, mortal and imperfect, it 



52 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

would be mating this, his creature, to inevitable dis- 
appointment, and boundless misery. But being Him- 
self the only one in whom man can be at peace, it is 
in love no less than in righteousness, that He demands 
man's devotion and reliance. Faith is the channel of 
this. And the exhaustless infinitude of the reservoir 
thus opened implies the growing faith, and the grow- 
ing love, and the growing gratitude of the human and 
dependent being, between whom and the Fountain of 
all Being, faith has opened the channel. The revela- 
tion (rod has made of Himself, sets before the soul 
eternity as the limitless horizon of its hopes and des- 
tinies. When Sorrow is musing over the mouldering 
dust of the lost, and Philosophy whispers and stam- 
mers its faint hopes of an obscure and shadowy Per- 
haps, and of a Judge who may perchance be friendly, 
and of an Eternity per ad venture one of felicity, Faith — 
mighty Faith, clasping the clue of Scripture, and look- 
ing to the cross and opened tomb of him who is the Re- 
deemer and. the Resurrection, — that Christ Jesus who 
brought life and immortality to light,— sees clearly, and 
promises, confidently and explicitly, an abundant en- 
trance into an everlasting kingdom, and a cordial wel- 
come to a glorious home, in the brotherhood of angels, 
the bosom of the Redeemer and the heart of the Divine 
Father. In the character of Jesus, the incarnate Grod, 
it finds, for all its aspirations after excellence an Infi- 
nite and Perfect Pattern, and for all its cravings after 
sympathy, an unfailing and effective Solace. In the 
Scriptures discovering and pursuing an exhaustless 
mine of truth, it discerns also along the whole course 



FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 53 

of history, the track and foot-prints of a Superintend- 
ing and Unerring Providence, the same in purpose and 
plan that the Bible describes in the Lord of lords and 
King of kings. Thus taught, it sees the mysteries 
and sorrows, the vexations and conflicts of life ex- 
plained as elsewhere they are not ; and to its view, 
thus strengthened and extended, earth and Heaven 
run into each other. This prepares for that state. 
That state redresses the wrongs and woes of this. 
And the Christian's duties, trials and snares compel 
him more habitually to ponder these truths, and make 
it continually more and more his interest to heed and 
trust (rod's true testimonies as to the reasons of His 
dispensations. And Christ is found, in the believer's 
prolonged experience, more and more to deserve at the 
hands of His followers an implicit credence and an 
unreserved confidence. The more frequently He is 
consulted, and the more simply He is relied upon, the 
better is He loved, and yet the more deeply is He re- 
vered and adored. The more clearly is He seen to be, 
at the same time, in His humanity near and approach- 
able, and in His holy symmetry of moral character, 
and in his full Divinity the infinitely high and unap- 
proachable ; and thus is He, at the same time, very 
near, as the centre of our existence in whom we live 
and have our being, and yet infinitely outspread be- 
yond and above us, as the wide and untraceable cir- 
cumference of an all-embracing and omnipresent Deity. 
And as we see how the promises of Scripture, all radi- 
ating from Him, and all attracting to Him, changed 
in earlier times the face of earth and opened the win- 



54 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

dows of Heaven, we are rebuked in our apathy, and 
become awakened to prove for ourselves their yet un- 
spent energy. You see in the missionary carrying 
this gospel to the ancient haunts of Paganism where 
Satan's seat is, and you read in the story of the Re- 
formers and the primitive Christians, the need and the 
might of Faith, resting upon these same promises, and 
upon the Great Head of the Church around whom these 
promises cluster. And what these laborers needed and. 
yet need, you alike require. Faith is as indispensable 
to you as to them, for this is the victory that overcometh 
the world, even our faith. And the world and sin and 
Satan are foes to be vanquished by the followers of 
Christ in every station and era : for they are enemies 
not peculiar to the fields of heathenism, or to the times 
of Truth's first collisions with Rome Pagan, or Rome 
Papal. 

4. The office and character of the Holy Ghost, the 
author of Faith, point to the same results. The Sa- 
viour himself described the influence of this Spirit's 
indwelling, "as a well of water" in the disciple 
" springing up into everlasting life." # The fountain, 
leaping into the sunlight, with ever fresh waters, is 
not wearied — is not spent, because for ages it has been 
pouring forth its new streams, under changing skies, 
and rolling seasons, and amid the revolutions and 
decay of human empires. For it there has been 
needed no pause, no intermission ; but it goes rejoic- 
ing and sparkling on its way. And even thus we are 
taught that the waters of life within the renewed 

* John, iv. 14. 



FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 55 

soul, — the impulses of Faith caught from the Spirit, 
the former of faith — will be evermore shooting up- 
ward with an unspent energy, and maintaining a per- 
petual freshness. It may be objected, such views of 
this grace imply its continuance into the eternal world. 
AYe accept the inference. The apostle Paul expressly 
speaks of Faith with Hope and Charity as abiding. The 
excellent Watts, in many of his hymns, has aided to 
foster the opinion that Faith expires with the attain- 
ment of the celestial state. But whilst we allow that 
the saints in light " walk" not " by faith," as do the 
saints of earth, but rather "by sight;" we do not see 
that this involves the extinction of all faith. Much 
of all the knowledge of a finite and dependent being 
must consist in faith upon the statements of the Om- 
niscient and All-sustaining (rod, the Being whose 
knowledge is alone all-embracing sight, and omnipres- 
ent vision. Even the angels, we know, have not un- 
limited knowledge, for the Saviour declares that they 
know not the date of the judgment day. Imagine 
one of these angels to have from Grod hereafter, and 
before its occurrence, intelligence of that dread date, 
how otherwise would he know it than by faith, — faith 
in the veracity and fuller knowledge of the Grod mak- 
ing to him such special communication ? The celes- 
tial state, and even the angelical rank, are not then 
inconsistent with the need and exercise of Faith. 

Faith, thus ever-growing, alike from the nature and 
laws of the human mind into which it comes, and of 
the revelation and scripture on which it feeds, and of 
the God on whose character and work it dwells, and 



-56 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

of the Holy Spirit in whose agency it begins and is 
continued, spreads its influence into all the affections 
of the soul, ancj all its estimates of life, and moulds 
alike its views of duty and danger and interest. If " as 
the man thinketh in his heart, so is he ;" especially do 
those " thinkings" which refer to eternity and Grod 
affect and mould his whole " being." True, genuine 
Faith, whilst before (rod it is the most humble and 
dependent of principles, becomes before the world and 
Hell, the most independent, impracticable, and unman- 
ageable of principles. It " endures" and subdues the 
world and the Prince of this world, " as seeing" the 
Victor and Doomer of that world, " Him the In- 
visible" Grod. It is a pregnant remark of the acute 
and devout Bengel, that as Faith is here made the 
parent of all Christian graces, so Unbelief, its opposite, 
gives birth and kindred to a long train of allied sins.* 
He who scouts the word of Grod's good revelation and 
that Incarnate Son, who is eminently the Word of 
God, will find that his unbelief does not dwell alone, a 
solitary and sterile sin. It takes to itself, necessarily, 
other sins, its kin and descendants ; and as in the par- 
able of our Lord, "seven devils worse than the first," 
may be found, at last, the occupants of that soul, 
which seemed, at first, " empty, swept and garnished." 
The modes, in which an enlargement of this grace 
is to be sought, we cannot here and now specify # 
Prayer — much prayer is evidently needed. The Spirit 
as the implanter and sustainer of faith, and Christ as 
its great Theme and Root, are to be honored by such 
* See Appendix, ISTote B. 



FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 57 

earnest and constant prayer. The connection of strong 
supplication with strong confidence is beautifully im- 
plied, in the manner in which the Old Testament, and 
the New, vary the language of one and the same 
promise. The prophet Isaiah, in announcing the 
Messiah, as the object of faith to the Gentiles, has the 
language, as our translators literally render it from 
the Hebrew : " And in that day there shall be a Root 
of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people ; 
to it shall the Gentiles seek."* The same Holy 
Spirit, when moving on the mind of the Apostle Paul 
to reproduce this testimony, in another language, the 
Greek, thus varies it: "And again Esaias saith: 
there shall be a Root of Jesse, and he that shall rise 
to reign over the Gentiles ; in him shall the Gentiles 
trust."! The "seeking" of prayer and ' adoration, 
and the " trusting" of Faith, are here regarded as one 
and interchangeable. And whether the efficacy of 
Prayer, in obtaining and in expanding the gift of 
Faith, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, the 
spontaneous, energetic impulse of Faith, to reveal and 
embody itself, in vows, and appeals, and strong sup- 
plications to the object of its trust, be regarded, it 
will readily be seen, how the seekers soon become 
those who trust in Christ, and how those trusting in 
this Root of Jesse and this Ensign to the Gentiles, do 
habitually and earnestly seek Him. Blessed will our 
lot be thus to believe, and thus to worship. For he 
that believeth shall be saved. And whosoever shall 
call on the name of the Lord shall be saved. 

* Isaiah, xi. 10. \ Rom. xv. 12. 

3* 



58 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

Faith is, again, to be cherished and strengthened, 
by exercise. As the earthly warrior is not made such, 
by the holdiday parade merely, the epaulette, and the 
nodding plume, and the fluttering of silken standards, 
but by the dust and toil of the actual field, and by 
the agony of the strife and the death-grapple ; so the 
heroes of faith become such, not by mere profession, 
or large knowledge, or solemn rite, but by fighting 
manfully the good fight of faith, armed with the 
whole armor of God, and resisting, in the name and 
strength of the Captain of their salvation, sin unto 
the death. They thus resist it in the world, and in 
the church, in heathendom abroad and in Christendom 
at home ; but most anxiously and most earnestly, first 
and last, do they resist its triumphs and detest its 
power in their own hearts and lives. 

Even the worldly and sensual Groethe could admire, 
and in his biography has recorded his admiration of, 
the power of a simple faith in his friend, the pious, 
but at times visionary Jung Stilling. Be, disciple of 
Christ, what interest, and duty, and vows — what a 
Redeemer's commands and a Redeemer's promises — 
what the love and the energy of the Indwelling Spirit, 
all alike require thee to be — eminently a believer. 
Let a " thus saith the Lord," be to thee, evidence suf- 
ficient and indubitable. A " thus saith the Lord," 
built the world at first. It may well lay and rear the 
whole fabric of thy hopes from nethermost base to 
topmost pinnacle. It was the Messiah's own weapon, 
in his personal conflict with the Tempter, and Satan 
remembers yet its deadly edge. Even for this life, 



FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 59 

what power has a blind or misplaced Faith. Buona- 
parte exulted in the vague sentiment, that a Higher 
Power held and guided him. He claimed to be the 
Child of Destiny. It made his will iron, and his 
hopes generally invincible. It is your felicity and 
glory, not vaguely to hope, but distinctly to know 
from the book, and covenant, and oath of the Almighty 
G-od, that you are the child, not of a blind, unpledged 
Fate, but the ward and offspring of a paternal and be- 
nignant Providence ; and that as a father pitieth his 
children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him. 
So called — so guided — so guarded, run the race set 
before thee ; fight the good fight — win the bright 
crown ; — the race, and the fight, and the crown of an 
overcoming faith. 



LECTURE III. 



VIRTUE. 



« ADD TO YOUR FAITH, VIRTUE." 

2 Peter, i. 5. 



We hear much from the moralist in praise of virtue. 
He portrays in brilliant hues her serene loveliness and 
majesty ; and calls the world to bow at her feet, daz- 
zled by, and adoring her radiance. And it is some- 
times intimated, that all of true value in the New 
Testament is the resplendent perfection of its morality ; 
and, that having extracted this, we may safely dismiss 
its doctrines and mysteries as a worthless residuum, — 
the lifeless dregs, of no farther advantage when the es- 
sence and elixir of their composition, or the moral code 
of the Lawgiver of Nazareth, has been once drawn 
off. Christ was indeed a matchless teacher of morals ; 
but He was something more. The Christian cannot 
accede to such representations. He would as soon 
praise the flower of the tulip at the expense of its 
root, and believe the plant the better for the loss of 
what gave it support and life ; and as easily be per- 
suaded to show his sense of the beauty of the cloud 
of blossoms that covers a fruit-tree in spring, by gird- 
ling and blasting the darker trunk and the contorted 



VIRTUE. 61 

and hidden radicles from which they have grown, and 
thus renouncing the luscious and full-formed fruit, into 
which the later season of autumn would make those 
blossoms to grow, as he would hope to exalt true virtue 
by disparaging that faith whence it is to shoot, and 
by which it is to be sustained and perfected. 

I. And what is virtue ? When applied to beings 
above man or to objects beneath man, we suppose it to 
mean power for good. So when our incarnate (rod 
and Saviour was touched by the woman having for 
years an issue of blood, her trembling grasp stole virtue. 
There was power for good and for healing, in the 
rustling garments and the hem of the robe of the In- 
carnate Deity. So too in objects inanimate we may 
ascribe to a remedy virtue, or a power to assuage pain 
and repel disease. But applied to man and human 
conduct, virtue may be said to designate habits of 
good. It is not the occasional act, but the settled and 
daily practice, and the rooted habit that are requisite 
to render a man truly virtuous. The old heathen 
looked to certain classes of excellencies, and gave 
them the especial, if not exclusive, name of virtue. 
With the Roman (and so the Greek before him) it was 
courage. He knew no higher moral adorning for man 
than this bold and fearless manhood that defied peril, 
and braved death. And some interpreters of Scripture, 
looking to this narrow and classical use of the term, 
would give to the word in our text but the restricted 
meaning of boldness in the profession of faith, and 
would suppose the apostle to require of the disciple 
believing in Jesus fearlessly to publish it before the 



62 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

persecuting magistrate who might occupy the Pagan 
tribunal, and the murderous rabble crowding the Pa- 
gan shrines. In the few other instances in which the 
word occurs in the New Testament, we see no trace 
of such limited and narrow signification, and would not, 
therefore, give it here ; alien too as such confined and 
partial sense seems to the current of the passage. # In 
the days of chivalry, a similar disposition to give the 
honors and title of virtue to certain isolated traits of 
excellence displayed itself. Then, as in classic an- 
tiquity, virtue was in the one sex but courage and 
loyalty, and in the other but the absence of indelicacy. 
It was the praise of a noble family, the inventory of its 
hereditary virtues, that all its sons were brave, and 
all its daughters chaste. But certainly these are not 
the whole of virtue. A warrior may be brave as his 
own sword, and have too as little conscience or mercy 
as his weapon. Is he therefore, virtuous, though, like 
Tilley the brave, he give a Magdeburg to the horrors 
of fire, pillage, and rapine for whole days ? Through 
the long gallery of British sovereigns is seen moving 
sullenly Mary of the Tudor line. She was of unim- 
peached purity, and shall we for that single cause 
deem her like the character portrayed in the book of 
Proverbs, entitled to the honors of a " virtuous woman?' 
whilst we remember her cold, stern ferocity, and 
whilst there cling to her queenly robes the odors of 
burnt flesh, gathered from her human holocausts of the 
meek martyrs of Smithfield ? No. Virtue is a word 
of wider meaning. "We suppose it, in the Scriptural 

* See Appendix, Note C. 



VIRTUE. 63 

use of it, to include all that moral excellence which 
the world honors, all those habits of good which are 
useful to human society, and conduce to the happiness 
and order of this present life. Now godliness is profit- 
able for the world that noiv is, as well as for the world 
to come. Virtue thus considered is the human and 
terrestrial side of true piety. Religion has its two 
aspects, its bearing upon the one hand on eternity, and 
God, and the invisible world of his abode ; and, on the 
other side, its bearing on time and man, and this vis- 
ible transitory scene of our earthly pilgrimage. And 
men may see the beauty of one of these aspects who 
have no sympathy with, or adequate conception of, the 
other of them. The generosity of Dorcas might win 
the praise of her poorer neighbors, whilst they neither 
understood nor liked her new faith, and for themselves 
clung to Paganism, and daily adored the idols whom 
she had most earnestly renounced. The centurion 
Julius, and the governor Festus, and the king Agrippa, 
might all respect the temperance, and magnanimity, 
and intelligence of the apostle Paul ; whilst for the 
Saviour whom he served they had neither ears nor 
heart. Demetrius had " good report of all men" for 
his virtues, whilst his piety and prayerful habits, and 
religious principles, could be appreciated only by his 
felloiv -disciples. Here we see, also, the reason why, 
in the Bible — the book that has done so much to im- 
plant and confirm, to perfect and diffuse virtue through- 
out the world — the volume, to which personal integrity, 
and the household charities, and the civic virtues, are 
all so largely indebted, there is yet so little said of 



64 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

virtue under that name. The Scriptures talk much 
more of Holiness and Righteousness, of the love of 
God and the love of man. The Bible represents us as 
men having duties and relations in two distinct and 
remote countries. The one is on these earthly shores. 
Here we are bound to our fellow-man, and in our rela- 
tions to him should cherish and display all the virtues 
and charities of the home, and the neighborhood, and 
the state, as upright, diligent, pure, and patriotic, and 
useful men. But there is another land where are our 
gravest ties, and where we are to make our longest 
abode, and find our chiefest inheritance. Though in- 
visible to the eye of sense, Reason whispers of it, Con- 
science intimates it, and Faith reveals it. There our 
(rod dwells, there adjudges upon character, and seals 
on it the imprint of indelibility and eternity. Already 
we are under his wrath by sin. He sent thence the 
ambassador and atonement to witness the possibility 
and the avenue of pardon. Accessible to prayer, He 
is yet sending thence grace, forgiveness, and hope ; 
and thither at death he gathers the good into endless 
bliss, and from his throne there consigns to exile and 
wrath the unholy, in bonds never to be parted, and in 
flames never to be quenched. 

Now, in the commerce of this life we see men hav- 
ing obligations in two countries. If they have debts 
and duties in both, their discharge of these debts and 
duties in one land is not enough to pronounce them 
honest, should they wilfully overlook and violate the 
obligations incumbent upon them in the other. So is 
man the citizen alike of Time and Eternity, — the two 






VIRTUE. 65 

worlds, severed by the narrow frith of death ; — the 
land of the visible and transitory, and the land of the 
invisible and imperishable. 

Now the scriptural term, Holiness, includes both 
classes of duties. It takes in the common law of both 
these worlds. Virtue; the world's more favored term, 
comprises on the other hand, but that part of a man's 
obligations, in this life, which bind him to his fellow- 
citizens here. It is then but a part — an important 
part it must be owned, — but still only a lesser and 
subordinate part of the entire field of his duties. The 
Book of God, looking at the sons of Adam as the 
creatures of Heaven, framed by it, and for it, demands 
of them holiness, the indispensable term of citizenship 
there. Looking at God in his character of a Righteous 
Sovereign, it demands of us, His subjects, righteous- 
ness — inherent or imputed — that we may please Him 
whom the unrighteous cannot please. Looking at 
Him as the Source, and Sum, and Model of all Moral 
Excellency, it demands conformity to that peerless 
image, or godliness. Looking at the motive as the 
true coloring and law of the act, and at the heart as 
the great fountain of feeling and motive, it requires 
of that heart as its supreme law, Love to Grod in the 
supremest degree, and an equitable love of our neigh- 
bor even as ourselves ; and by these motives would have 
all feeling and all action prompted. Holiness, or Grodli- 
ness, or Righteousness, as prophets and. apostles speak, 
is the whole duty of man in his entire being, and as the 
citizen of two worlds. It includes Virtue, as the whole 
includes a part. But Virtue does not include Holi- 



66 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

ness. A man may, as far as the outer act is concerned, 
not be notoriously deficient (he may even be eminent 
and praiseworthy) in his earthly and human relations, 
and yet lack piety, true faith to God, and true love to 
Him, and so miss His favor, and forfeit His heaven. 
When, then, cavillers ask, Why should not the Chris- 
tian give up his doctrines and mysteries of Faith, and 
fall back content on the mere bare morals of the New 
Testament — it will be seen that the objection assumes 
to divide what God has not divided — to sever the 
man's immortality from his mortality, Eternity from 
Time, and Heaven from Earth, the throne of reckon- 
ing from the scene of probation, and the Sovereign 
Creator from His creature and subject. It assumes to 
discharge a man from all his obligations to his native 
country, Heaven, and to his Father and Maker there, 
provided he will but defray his moral indebtedness, 
his debts of human duty in this foreign land of earth, 
where he stays but for the brief date of this present 
life, and which he must quit at death. It sets up a 
power in human society and earthly morality, to com- 
pound for man's hopeless insolvency before another 
tribunal, in a greater country and a mightier kingdom 
than Earth : whilst, at the same time, this earth re- 
mains necessarily and ever but a subject province and 
outlying colony of that greater, mightier kingdom. 
It teaches a man to take out, under the pettifogging 
legislation, and abridged and diluted morality of the 
world, an indemnity and release, that is to discharge 
him from the claims of his Maker, and the retributions 



VIRTUE. 67 

of Eternity. Is the attempt wise ? "Will the exper- 
iment be safe ? 

We have thus seen the nature of virtue, and its 
limits as a part of true piety, and included within 
holiness, but not itself comprehending all that the 
Scriptures denote under the names of godliness, and 
righteousness, and kindred terms. 

Now the apostle speaks of Faith as requiring the 
addition of Virtue, or as involving in its natural 
growth and development, the exhibition of these hu- 
man and earthly excellencies. Yet there has been 
unhappily a disposition to divorce the two. Faith has 
been professed by some as if it might exist bereft of 
Virtue. These have been misjudging, or unfaithful 
professors of Christianity. Others, secretly, or by un- 
blushing avowal, the opponents of the (xospel, have 
claimed to show the sufficiency of Virtue without 
Faith. Let us look at the teachings of the Grod who 
made us, and of the Revelation that shall judge us, 
and learn thence how Virtue must be added to or 
grow out of Faith. These will furnish the remaining 
divisions of our theme. The nature of Virtue we 
have already discussed. It is left to consider 

II. Faith without Virtue. 

III. Virtue without Faith : and lastly, 

IV. Faith growing into Virtue. 

II. As early, then, as the days of apostles, ere yet 
the canon of the New Testament had been closed with 
its last seals, and shut up with its dread and final 
thunderings, there were in the Christian Church those 



68 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

who would make Faith suffice without Virtue. And 
Paul denounced them for turning the grace of Grod 
into licentiousness ; and James challenged them to 
show, if it were possible, a genuine Faith without 
works of Virtue and Piety, and he would be content 
to show his Faith by such works and fruits, and 
which are, in fact, the only possible evidences before 
men of its indwelling. In later times there have been 
similar errors. Some really loving and practising 
piety, have yet, in their crude and hasty theories, dis- 
credited morality and virtue, for the purpose of ex- 
tolling, as they supposed, Religion. Others, enemies 
to true holiness, have, there is reason to fear, sought 
to hold the truth of Grod in unrighteousness, — with 
what success let the history of the Church and the 
world show. 

To the honest and erring panegyrists of Faith at 
the expense of Virtue, it has seemed impossible to 
preserve otherwise the great doctrine of Justification 
by Faith in the Righteousness of Christ. They have 
feared that an anxiety on the part of Christian 
teachers to enforce morality on the disciples of the 
Saviour, was, in the matchless imagery of the immor- 
tal dreamer, sending men to inquire the way to the 
Celestial City " from that young man, Mr. Civility, 
dwelling in the town of Morality," who would leave | 
the burdened inquirer to shiver and perish under the 
overhanging and flaming precipices of Sinai, when 
the true pathway led to the foot of the Cross. They 
have asked ; If practising good works to man be neces- 
sary, how could the dying thief be saved, who had 



VIRTUE. 69 

not leisure and scope to work them ? Pointing to the 
great and undeniable fact of human depravity, as 
running through and tainting the best services even 
of the best saints, whilst yet on earth, they ask, Can 
such deeds, so imperfect at best, have any share in 
our salvation ? Quoting the language of Augustine, 
when in his own daring and magnificent style he 
called the most resplendent virtues of old heathenism 
and of the Grentile philosophy, but " splendid sins," 
from the pride and self-reliance which they displayed, 
such friends of Faith have asked ; What room has 
Virtue, human and imperfect, in the scheme of Divine 
Grace ? 

In all this, they overlook the harmony of Paul and 
James. With the great apostle of the Uncircumcision 
we must hold, that Faith alone justifies before God, 
and this without works. But with the apostle of the 
Circumcision we must also hold that the genuine 
Faith, thus justifying before God, without works and 
by Christ's merits and righteousness, yet necessarily 
must, when it quits God's courts and brooks man's 
scrutiny, before man justify itself by works, and by 
Christ's sanctification in us, as proof of such faith. 
Before the dread tribunal, — the grand and fina 1 audit 
— who of us dare appear with any other discharge 
than that which the mighty Luther saw in his dream, 
the record steeped in the blood of Christ ? Yes, there, 
over our sentence and the long, dark catalogue of of- 
fence and demerit, stands inscribed, alone and suffi- 
cient, on the roll : "Christ died." He was made sin 
for us. But before man, and in this life, (before the 



70 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

man of the church and the man of the world,) I un- 
furl another, an inferior record. The faith I ask you 
to accept and fraternize, men of the church — the 
faith I ask you to honor and imitate, men of the 
world, — is one evidencing its origin by all works of 
holy obedience ; and the sentiment emblazoned on it 
is, " Work out your own salvation with fear and trem- 
bling." 

Thus much may be said to those loving the great 
cardinal truth of Justification by Faith, and dreading 
its subversion by any honors as they fear unwarrant- 
ably given to good works, or virtue. But, there is an- 
other class who would substitute faith for virtue. It 
was most wittily, and not unjustly said, by a French 
scholar, against the Jesuits, in their anxiety to compli- 
cate doctrine and eliminate piety, that they were men 
who lengthened the creed and shortened the command- 
ments. Such eras of misdirected activity in the pro- 
fessed churches of Christ have been followed by the 
evident and sorest scourges of Divine Providence. 
The Greek Church, losing all practical holiness, and 
wrangling about questions of no profit, as the apostle 
terms them, made way for the grand outburst of Ma- 
hommedan imposture and conquest and devastation. 
In a few generations after Luther, the churches of Prot- 
estant Germany became thus speculative and litigious 
for the faith, and there too, foulest scandals and 
fiercest wars ensued. In Catholic France, Louis XT., 
the most debauched of the profligate race of the 
Bourbon sovereigns, was in his fashion a stickler for 
faith, instructing in religious doctrines and observances 



VIRTUE. 



71 



the wretched companions of his lewder hours. But 
what better service did such motiveless faith do, for 
religion, than was done by the sceptic of Ferney, the 
relentless Voltaire, in his unblushing blasphemies ? 
A faith that shamed decency, and an indecency that 
scouted faith, were both alike unchristian : and in all 
the carnival of Hell that marked the first French 
Revolution, was to be seen not more the action of the 
Infidelity that rejected Christ, than the reaction of 
the foul Hypocrisy that, feigning to adore Him, had 
crucified Him afresh. The piety of such mitred and 
anointed pretenders as Cardinal Dubois and his royal 
master Louis XV., was, to say the least, as much re- 
sponsible for the Reign of Terror, as was the impiety 
of Diderot, Voltaire, or D'Holbach. And the modern 
professor of Christ's name needs to watch, lest he, by 
formality or hypocrisy, renew the sale that Judas 
made of the Master to his fiercest enemies, and put to 
an open shame the Lord to whom he has vowed and 
owes the profoundest adoration. As for Antinomian- 
ism, where it really exists, claiming Righteousness 
and rejecting Holiness, and making orthodoxy a cloak 
for all unhealed corruption, it is a foul abuse of Grod's 
most glorious and gracious truths. It conserves sin, 
when the gospel would subdue and exterminate it. It 
wastes the balm and spikenard and myrrh of Christ's 
grace in embalming that body of death against which 
Paul groaned and fought. The true gospel, (honoring' 
the law,) came to work on man a moral resurrection, 
raising the spiritually dead to newness and holiness 
of life. This gospel (against the law) comes to put 



72 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

in the place of this moral miracle, in the room of this 
spiritual resurrection of the regenerate soul, a mere 
Egyptian resurrection, — retaining the shrivelled and 
loathsome and decaying mummy, swathed in grave- 
clothes, voiceless and motionless — not a soul new born 
from sin, but a soul coffined and embalmed in sin. 

III. But there is another class who proclaim the 
superiority of Yirtue to Faith, and the sufficiency be- 
fore Grod and man, for this life and the next, of Yirtue 
without Faith. They are wont to quote the maxim, 
as if it were an unquestionable axiom : 

" For modes of faith let graceless bigots tight, 
His faith cannot be wrong, whose life is right." 

But if, as we have endeavored to show, Virtue be but 
the small portion of man's duties that he owes in this 
life to his fellow-mortals, and man be formed for an- 
other life as well as this, and have a Grod as well as 
human society to regard and propitiate, it seems im- 
possible on any rational principle, much more upon 
any scriptural basis, to establish it that the discharge 
of this small portion of his obligations shall be accepted 
in full for his neglect of yet higher duties to a yet 
higher Being. And if, in matters of human courtesy 
and friendship even, you are wont to look at the mo- 
tive as determining the worth or worthlessness of 
the service rendered, does it not seem necessary even 
to the claim of true virtue for these social and human 
duties, that the man discharging them do it from right 
motives, from the true love of man and the paramount 
love and fear of Almighty Grod ? Now, Grod has 



VIRTUE. 73 

wisely and kindly so framed and united us, that these 
human, virtues are profitable to men, and honored 
amongst them. And from more selfish love of such 
profit, from mere vain craving after this attendant 
honor and praise, men may discharge the duties. But 
are such duties, so prompted by lower and baser mo- 
tives, genuine virtue ? Must not God try the heart to 
fix the character of those actions that externally and 
apparently are virtue, but that may prove what Augus- 
tine branded as " splendid sins" ? 

Again, take a few of the more eminent and exem- 
plary of those whose virtues are thus held up as sur- 
passing the fruits of Christian faith. Take Hobbes, 
the philosophical oracle of the court of the last Stuarts. 
Take Hume, whom his friend, Adam Smith, pronoun- 
ced among the most faultless of human characters ; or 
in later times Bentham. We have selected names 
amongst those destitute of faith, who were, more than 
ordinarily sceptics are, examples free from the ordinary 
blots of immorality that attend the rejection of the 
Christian faith. And after a close analysis of the 
lives and influence of these men, do you not find the 
inquiry of the apostle remaining still in full force, 
" Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that 
believeth that Jesus is the Christ ?" Was the morality 
of any of these men superior to the average morality 
of their times ? Did Virtue do in them what Faith 
achieves in the Christian — overcome the world ? Did 
it rise above the world as they found it ? Again, did 
it tend to improve that world, recovering its degraded, 
and uplifting its oppressed classes ? To ascertain this, 

4 



74 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

look beyond the men to the character of their associ- 
ates and disciples, in the case of those who most de- 
liberately and boldly propagated their own rejection of 
the faith of the Saviour. Take Hume's doctrine of 
the comparative harmlessness of licentiousness, and 
the innocence of suicide, and looking at the moral re- 
sults of the doctrines, can you accept the teacher of 
such dogmas as a virtuous man, more than you would 
call an honest and good-tempered retailer of covert 
poisons, virtuous ? Look at the deadly effect on 
morals, and patriotism, and public virtue, of the les- 
sons of Hobbes, quoted and applauded in the most 
profligate and unprincipled court that ever cursed 
England — look at the social speculations and princi- 
ples of some of Bentham's most intimate and admir- 
ing disciples : and do you not see that instead of over- 
coming the world, theirs was a virtue, if it be called 
such, that was overcome, debased, and lowered by the 
world ? But take their principles, abstracted from 
the continual corrective and counterpoise of Christian 
influence in the community around. Lay aside all 
Christian faith. Go out, as missionaries of the new 
Lights of Philosophy without Christianity ; and who 
of you would hope to see the new creed, like the faith 
of the New Testament, teaching the barbarian, taming 
the cannibal, quenching the funeral pyre of the Hindoo 
widow, snatching the daughters of China from death 
in infancy, and everywhere disciplining conscience, in- 
spiring hope, repressing passion, and establishing order 
— making Freedom possible, and Law and Duty sov- 
ereign over the nations ? 



VIRTUE. 75 

To this principle of the sufficiency of virtue without 
faith, we have, then, these objections. It overlooks 
man's immortality, and the existence of an endless 
state beyond the tomb, and ignores the being and the 
rights of God. It takes, again, from virtue its root 
and its law, its sanctions and its motives, and thus 
exposes it to speedy decay. It wrongs man by trun- 
cating his nature of conscience and immortality. It 
wrongs Grod, by rejecting His revelation, and spurning 
as needless, His provisions of the Redeeming Christ 
and the Renewing Spirit. Instead of evangelizing the 
nations, and reforming them, it has but aided to em- 
broil and brutifv them. 

IV. But turn, in conclusion, to dwell rather upon 
the union that Scripture makes between the two prin- 
ciples, which we have seen isolated and divorced, re- 
quiring as those Scriptures do, the man of Faith to 
become the pattern of Virtue, abounding in every good 
word and work. 

Multitudes of the race, then, (and this the mere 
moralist overlooks,) have become the victims of Vice^ 
outcasts from the school, and hostile to the restraints 
of Virtue. The problem is not to guide the sinless, 
but to recover the sinful. They are the rabble whom 
the philosopher, in mingled scorn and despair, does 
not attempt even to lecture, an audience neither "fit" 
nor " few" enough to accept or appreciate his labors. 
They are the unwashen, savage hordes, whom civiliza- 
tion mowed down in the progress of her colonies, or 
held pent up apart in the purlieus of her great cities, 
or harnessed and drove as a part of the machinery to 



76 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

conduct and to be consumed by her gigantic manufac- 
tures. What shall reform this forlorn class ? If yon 
bring but human and terrene motives, if you can min- 
ister to them only earthly and mortal aids, can you 
crane them up to the desired level of knowledge and 
self-respect ? How can you efface the brand of sin on 
their souls ? Morality has not the Atoning Calvary. 
It cannot call down on its Pentecostal aspirations the 
rushing fires of the Holy Ghost, falling to infuse a 
new soul in the corrupt grave of a fallen humanity, 
and to create out of the drudge and dupe of Belial, 
the heir of Heaven and the child of God. 

The virtue that would be thus recuperative, on the 
masses, must be preceded by a faith, with which 
shall go the regenerating power of God, and for 
which shall have been first provided the great remedial 
and reconciliatory process of the Redemption. Vir- 
tue, then, needs Faith to furnish the requisite soil, in 
which to set her pleasant plants of righteousness, and 
then she needs to find in the lessons and examples of 
Faith, the framework on which those plants may 
grow, and above all, the root Christ, on whose grace 
and aid all true virtue in man must be engrafted ; and 
then she needs in Faith to find the showers of the 
Spirit, refreshing, and increasing, and fructifying the 
offshoots of righteousness, thus planted, thus trained, 
and thus engrafted. With these resources, Virtue may 
be spread and sustained. But without them, where is 
the power that can make the individual, the house- 
hold, the neighborhood, the tribe, and the race, really 
and permanently, habitually and radically, virtuous ? 



VIRTUE. 77 

Let the Pharisee or the Sadducee go with another doc- 
trine than that of Faith to Zaccheus, would they have 
won his fourfold restitution of aught wrongly gained ? 
Let the Stoic or Epicurean go to the converts of 
Ephesus, whilst not yet disciples of Jesus, and when, 
as at first, addicted to magical arts. Could Philosophy 
have ejected the superstition and the imposture, and 
relaxed the hold of Fraud and of Greed upon their 
souls ? Or, to come down to our times, see in the 
Karen Mission Ko Thah-Byu, the robber and murderer. 
Thirty of his fellow-men, that tiger in human form has 
destroyed. Can your philosophy, your morality, your 
faith-scorning virtue make him what the Missionaries 
of Christian faith made him — penitent, lowly, loving, 
gentle, prayerful, and harmless ? To the test. Build 
for your virtue its altar against the altar of our faith. 
Call down the living fire. And, as said to the priests 
of Baal, the prophet of Jehovah, so say we to you : 
The God that shall answer by fire, he is God. 

Faith can produce Yirtue. Look again at the way 
in which she instructs virtue. Read the 12th chapter 
of the Epistle to the Romans, or take the same apos- 
tle's discourse of Charity and its fruits, in the 13th 
chapter of his first letter to the Corinthian church. 
Saw you ever such full, and brilliant, and unmatched 
portraitures of Yirtue as this ? 

But beside these preceptive instructions, remember 
that all the doctrines and mysteries that Faith receives 
have their practical lessons. The Fall, and Original 
Sin, how they teach humility and dependence on God 
—the first lessons of moral progress. The Incarnation 



78 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

and Redemption — is that a mere logomachy ? On the 
contrary, see in it a great scheme for the subdual of 
sin, and the implantation of Hope, and Love, and 
Gratitude. Look at the Trinity, and " dark with in- 
sufferable brightness" as that deep and astounding 
mystery is, yet all its truths minister readily and con- 
tinually to practical virtue. The Father stoops to 
adopt you into his household, and awaken confidence 
and filial awe. The Son speeds him from the throne 
of Paradise to the deepest, foulest hold of your dun- 
geon-home, to uplift, and ransom, and ennoble you — 
to become your Brother, and Liberator, and Exemplar. 
The Spirit bends over your ignorance, as the Teacher, 
and over your sadness as the Comforter ; and (rod, in 
His Trinity, is thus, on every side, and by every method, 
your Help and exceeding great Reward. Well might 
the poet cry, 

" Talk they of morals ? 
The grand morality, thou bleeding Lamb, 
Is love of Thee !" 

But must Faith produce always Yirtue ? It must, 
or it is not genuine. The inseparable accompaniment 
of true Faith in Scripture is Repentance ; and what 
is Repentance but the practical and hearty, the out- 
word and inward renunciation of Sin ? Such practi- 
cal fruits Christ regarded as glorifying His Father, 
and rejected the disciples that called him Lord, Lord, 
and "did" not the things He said. And the rule of 
the Judgment day is men's doings, the practical 
effects of Faith on their character, wherever life was 



VIRTUE. 79 

so lengthened as to give scope to the exhibition of such 
effects. " Except your righteousness exceed the 
righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye can in 
no case enter into the kingdom of Heaven," was 
Christ's announcement to his disciples while on earth. 
Do you suppose that when the Heavens restore Him 
again to the expectant and shuddering earth, in the 
Last Judgment, He will come to retract that law ? Be 
ye ready for its inevitable and unfaltering application. 
We should have delighted to pursue this theme, and 
show how the Faith of Christ has benefited the indi- 
vidual, elevated the family, emancipated woman ; 
how much, even where not fully received and obeyed, 
it has awed and shamed and restrained human wick- 
edness : but our time forbids us. Are you the pledged 
scholars and examples of this Faith ? remember it is 
not to be a barren creed, or an Antinomian heresy, a 
lying form, or a goodly mask, or a whited sepulchre ; 
but a glowing, up-growing, fruit-bearing reality. To 
your faith add "Virtue." 



LECTURE IV. 



KNOWLEDGE. 



« AND TO VIRTUE, KNOWLEDGE." 

2 Peter, i. 5. 



The Apostle bade Christians to become " living 
epistles" of Christ. And with what an impressive 
brilliancy do some transcribe and publish the power 
and glory of their Saviour, although placed in circum- 
stances of comparative obscurity and penury. Little 
indebted it may be to this world's schools, and sharing 
but in scanty measure, the world's possessions, yet in 
their illiterate retirement they read and ponder their 
Bible, and they are taught of the Spirit which first 
indited those Scriptures, and trust the testimonies of 
their Grod with a childlike and unquestioning faith, 
and adorn that faith by a humble and blameless vir- 
tue in their intercourse with their fellow-men. And 
although they 

" Just know, and know no more, their Bible true." * 

yet the lowly cottages which they tenant, and the 
pallet of infirmity and disease where they languish, 
are schools of spiritual profiting to all who may visit 

* CWper. 



KNOWLEDGE. 



81 



them. How radiant and mighty would be the churches 
of Christ, were they all made up of such a member- 
ship. How much of the scorn which the ungodly re- 
tort upon the admonitions of the Christian, — how 
much of the scepticism that, confessed or unconfessed, 
withstands the truth as it is in Jesus, would be at 
once quelled and hushed into an abashed silence, were 
but the Faith of Christ's disciples a more simple, 
ethereal, and earnest Faith, and- their virtue in the 
home and by the way, in the more private and the 
more public relations of life, only a more vigorous, 
symmetrical, and earnest virtue. 

And having this faith and such virtue, it might be 
said : What need we more ? But here end not the 
requirements of Grod's word, and here should not be 
stayed the aspirations of God's servants. It is well 
that Christians should, by their eminence in the prac- 
tice of Christian graces, witness for Christ where they 
may be unable to write or preach for Him, as in the 
days of Romish persecution in England, the aged dis- 
ciple whom the ecclesiastical judges, ere her martyr- 
dom, sought to perplex by captious questions, replied : 
" I cannot argue for my Saviour, but I can bum 
for Him." But is there not, beyond the testimony of 
the life and the confession of the lips, and the seal of 
the death even, an enlargement and illumination of the 
understanding, due alike to the gospel and to the char- 
acter of its Divine Author ? And when Faith appre- 
hends cheerfully the Truth of Grod, and when Yirtue 
reflects on mankind the goodness of Grod, so Christian 

knowledge comes in to ponder and to commend the 

4# 



82 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

wisdom of Grod. Faith clasps Truth with the heart ; 
Virtue subordinates to it the life ; knowledge embathes 
with it the intellect. And as religion demands the 
consecration of the entire man, so has it made, in the 
instrumentalities which it employs and in the influ- 
ence which it sheds, provision for all the faculties of 
his soul, and so the intellect as well as the conscience, 
the understanding of the man no less than his affec- 
tions, are summoned to develop themselves in those 
wide realms of the Messiah's dominion, and far-reach- 
ing vistas of duty for the Messiah's subjects which 
God's Providence opens, and in those broad pastures 
and richest mines of Revelation which the Scriptures 
present. Grrowth in grace implies an advance in re- 
ligious knowledge, no less than an increase of personal 
holiness. Such is the lesson of our text. "And to 
virtue knowledge." 

And to feel the significance of that injunction, let 
us implore the aids of that Divine Spirit whence alone 
cometh the knowledge which bringeth salvation, as we 
consider 

I. A prejudice here rebuked ; 

II. The grace here enjoined ; and 

III. Its order, as following and completing the 
Christian excellencies which precede it. 

I. There is, we suppose, then, in the Church of (rod, 
as well as in society generally, a disposition to exalt 
Practice at the expense of Theory ; and yet all prac- 
tice is but the embodiment of some theory. There is 
in some minds a disposition to mock at all science, 
and all patient and thorough thought as being but idle 



KNOWLEDGE. 83 

and unprofitable speculation. Common Sense is lauded 
at the expense of Study and Research. The laborer 
is exalted above the thinker, and the man of exper- 
imental activity is pronounced the truly useful, whilst 
the studious and reflecting is denounced as a thriftless 
and unprofitable cumberer of the earth, over which he 
moves in lonely and quiet meditation, little disposed, and 
it may be, also, little qualified, to uplift his voice amid 
the strife and din of the world's crowded arena. Bat 
Society and the Christian Church, need the thinker as 
much as they require the laborer. If the spade-man 
who digs the canal or rears the embankment of the 
rail-road be, as he really is, a most profitable servant, 
is the engineer who drew the line and ascertained the 
level, where the waters might flow and be fed, and 
where the rail-car might dart unimpeded, utterly un- 
profitable ? If the hand does excellent service in the 
body, moving quickly as it does, and grasping firmly, 
and thrusting vigorously, is there no room and no need 
in the body for the eye, because its usefulness is quite 
of another kind, as it holds in silence and fixedness 
its place in its ever quiet watch-tower, neither going 
out of its own nook, nor lifting a finger's weight of 
the obstacle or burden before it ? It is well for the 
church to be vigorously and practically virtuous, but 
is there no intelligence needed to direct, and to cher- 
ish, and to diffuse this virtue ? It was not fitting that 
every Christian convert should write epistles, in the 
days of the first Christians. But were the apostles 
therefore profitless when so employed? It is not 
needed, now, that every disciple become a Biblical 



84 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

critic, or write a commentary, or indite a body of the- 
ology ; but because a man may be abundantly useful 
without undertaking these forms of religious service, 
is it a sound inference, or is it merely a baseless preju- 
dice, which some cherish, when they would teach 
that commentaries, and criticism, and theology are all 
of little worth to the cause of Christ ? There is in 
the minds of some eager and zealous disciples of our 
Lord, an impatience which cannot brook the applica- 
tion of profound thought, and spurns, as impertinent 
and wasteful delay, what is really honest and thorough 
examination. They demand results, forgetting that 
results require processes to attain them. Every sea- 
man is not expected to construct his own nautical ta- 
bles, or every miner to build his own steam-engine, that 
may uplift the ore, or drain off the superfluous waters. 
Yet without the aid of the astronomer and the ma- 
chinist, of what avail would be the practical energy 
of the hardy mariner, or the begrimed miner toiling 
in his ever dark and narrow gallery ? So, in religion, 
a just, religious practice must grow out of just, re- 
ligious principles. And although a simple and child- 
like Faith may readily grasp the great outlines of 
these principles, it requires that Faith should be pa- 
tient, and studious, — (it requires that Faith should de- 
velop itself, in fact, into Knowledge,) in order that 
these principles may be fully understood and justly 
stated, may be seen in their due position, and may be 
held in their just proportion, and in their mutual de- 
pendence and symmetry. It required days and nights 
of profound and philosophical research for Franklin to 



KNOWLEDGE. 85 

devise the rod that draws from the thunder-cloud its 
lightnings harmlessly; and Chemistry needed its years 
of study, ere Sir Humphrey Davy could prepare the 
safety-lamp, which was to guard the delver in the 
mines from their perilous explosions. A child, or the 
most ignorant peasant, may he practically benefited 
by these contrivances, which certainly mere ignorance 
could never have invented. So in the labors of the 
churches of our own times, — are not we, — the hum- 
blest and most obscure laborers of us all, — benefited 
by the iron perseverance, and the patient acuteness 
with which God enabled some great and leading cham- 
pions of His gospel to ponder, and enunciate, and de- 
fend the truths taught in that Gospel ? 

2. But it may be said in extenuation of the preju- 
dice : Is it not in the learned classes that most here- 
sies have had their origin? We allow that many 
who have misguided their thousands have been strong 
in the lore of this world. But, on the other hand, 
shall we be told that the founder of Mormonism, and 
of that more wide-spread and enduring imposture, 
Mohammedanism, were, either of them, learned men ? 
And if, in other forms of spiritual delusion, an abused 
Learning has been the leader, who, it may be asked, 
has furnished the mass of the proselytes but an abused 
Ignorance ? If ignorance often saves a man from the 
danger of being a teacher in heresy, it would seem 
that it by no means protects him from the possibility 
of becoming a scholar in errors, alike preposterous and 
ruinous. But, it is said, Has not the voice of Scrip- 
ture warned us against " oppositions of Science" (or in 



86 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

other words, knowledge) "falsely so called?" Has it 
not lifted aloud its protest, that "the world, by wis- 
dom, knew not Grod," and that " the wisdom of this 
world is foolishness with G-od ?" Has not an apostle 
cautioned us, that knowledge puffeth up ? Why 
then, it may be said, should the humble scholar of 
prophets and apostles covet wisdom and knowledge ? 
Let us remember, that all this is but (rod's interdict 
against science or knowledge " falsely so called ;" — 
the wisdom that is of this world, and which is there- 
fore unreal and deceitful. But the wisdom coming 
from above, we are bidden to implore and to expect. 
Of knowledge, genuine and celestial, it is said, that it 
is not good that the soul be without it, and the Most 
High complains that His " people perish for lack of 
UP It was the guilt of the Pharisees, the class as- 
suming to control religious opinion in their age and 
their country, that they took away from their nation 
the key of knowledge, and that thus they would not 
let the multitudes enter the way of salvation. It is 
made the pivot, in the eternal destinies of the heathen 
dying without the gospel, that they have turned away 
from that which might be known of God in the works 
of Nature and the movements of Providence ; and 
this wilful shutting of the eyes, against an unwelcome 
knowledge of the Divine Nature and Divine Groodness, 
seals them to perdition. No. God's word does not 
prohibit the endeavor to attain true knowledge. It 
cautions us against the deceitful splendors of a false 
and superficial science — a knowledge wrongfully so 
called, consisting but of dreams and shows, — a knowl- 



KNOW LEDGE. 87 

edge of evil, mainly or only, that would nullify Truth, 
and banish the wisdom of the skies, to give her abdi- 
cated throne to the wisdom which is earthly and sen- 
sual, and devilish. 

II. Now our text, and, in full harmony with it, the 
entire body of Divine Scripture, require that the 
Christian profit in his religious course, by going on 
from faith to virtue, and from virtue to knowledge. 
The first great necessity of our nature is that we 
know ourselves, — that we learn from the book of God 
our origin and destiny, — the story of our Fall, and the 
story yet more wondrous, and yet more glad, of our 
Redemption — that we accept from the Scriptures the 
explanation of that moral dislocation, which we find 
in our own nature, and of that intestine warfare of 
Reason and Appetite, of Duty and Desire, under 
which the wisest of the heathen world have groaned, 
unrelieved and despairing. But thus to know our- 
selves, is the nearest and most necessary and most 
natural of all subjects of research ; and yet how dif- 
ficult to man unaided, is the study, and how rare are 
any deep attainments in these home-bred mysteries of 
our nature. But to have a just and safe knowledge 
of ourselves, it is needful that we know our God. 
Framed by Him and for Him, clinging to His arm by 
an eternal and inevitable dependence, enveloped and 
upheld by His perpetual and omnipresent Providence, — 
we cannot ascertain the moral bearings, or calculate, 
so to speak, the latitude and longitude of our own 
drifting course over the ocean of life ; but, as we refer 
to Him whose will is the meridian line by which we 



88 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

estimate the position of all beings, and whose favor is 
the Light and central Sun of our moral Life. And 
knowing ourselves, and knowing our God in Scrip- 
ture, we are called upon (as our duty and station in 
society may require it,) to know this world, — that 
portion of it called Nature, which we can reach and 
survey ; to know that course of events in man's past 
generations, and that march of the Divine purposes in 
the government of the race which we call History ; 
and to know Life, or those arts, and occupations, and 
relations, and human laws, and local customs, that 
are to affect us in the discharge of our duties to our 
fellows : making an Aquila, serviceable as a tent- 
maker, a Lydia, an upright vender of purple, an 
Eliezer, an honest steward of his master's household, 
and a Daniel, the sagacious and intrepid administrator 
of a mighty empire. We are required to know Man, 
not only as he should be, and as in his original inno- 
cence he ivas, but man as he is, in his selfishness, 
craftiness, and wretchedness, and yet, withal, in the 
long and tangled train of all his susceptibilities, and 
his capabilities, and his hopes and his fears, his sensi- 
tive conscience, his grovelling desires and his soaring 
aspirations, and his kindlier affections, — all the wrecks 
of Eden, that drift yet along the foaming and roaring 
stream of the world's strifes and the world's sins — 
relics of what Earth was ere Sin trode it, intimations 
of what Earth would be had grace not intervened, and 
of what Hell will be where grace is rejected, and 
mementoes of what Man may yet be, when grace shall 



KNOWLEDGE. 89 

have done its restoring and renewing work upon him, 
as made complete in righteousness. 

2. Is there not here a field sufficiently wide for all 
of power, and all of leisure that any of us can com- 
mand ? It was not the Scripture that proclaimed Ig- 
norance the mother of Devotion. On the contrary, 
religion has ever been the truest friend of real knowl- 
edge. It calls man indeed to acquire that knowledge 
in another order than that which an unrenewed 
and revolted world practise and commend. It bids us 
seek, first, the things of first moment — the pardon of 
sin, the renewal of the heart, and the favor and the 
kingdom of Grod. It bids us, in the spirit of a sound 
philosophy, and of a science celestial and sure, to go 
for our first principles to the first authority — Grod. It 
makes His revelations paramount to all the teachings 
of man. God's assertions as to the past, the present, 
or the future, in regard to the character and destiny 
of the race, must here override all the philosophies 
and all the conjectures of the Schools. It is so in Re- 
ligious Truth. It is so in Physical Science. To read 
the tangled maze of this world's chaotic history, Re- 
ligion lends us the clue of the Divine Providence. 
The first successful attempt to write a Universal 
History, was made by Bossuet. Holding this clue, he 
found Order, and Progress, and Harmony, where, to 
all scholars who wanted, or who spurned that guiding 
thread, there seems but wild uproar and a seething 
chaos of change without Progress and without Law. 
It is no arrogance to predict, that no satisfactory Uni- 
versal History can be written, except by the scholars 



90 



RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 



who, like Bossuet and Miiller, take up that same clue, 
and see in the wild and vast field of history, every- 
where, the footprints of a supervisory and sleepless 
Providence, and who rear at every era, and at each stile 
in the track of ages, an Ebenezer to the God hitherto 
helping the race toward the final goal of His own 
sure and good purposes. 

Our first business is, then, to know by earnest and 
prayerful study of the Scriptures, ourselves — our sin 
and our duty, our own conversion and the means of 
our continued sanctification. That Scripture must be 
studied in prayer for the influences of the Spirit. Led 
of Him, the Spirit of Truth, into all truth ; — brought 
into friendly and even filial relations with that (rod, 
the laws of whose works make Science, and whose 
human subjects act out History, and conjecture or 
dream what they call Philosophy — and invent Art, and 
establish Government, we shall, G-od-guided, study 
Government, and ^.rt, and Philosophy, and History, 
and Science and Revelation in their due relations to 
each other. We shall, then, according to the sublime 
language of a Christian philosopher of France,^ " See 
God in all things, and all things in God." 

3. Now, many Christians content themselves with 
the fragmentary and alphabetical knowledge of re- 
ligious truth, which they had acquired in their first 
exercise of a new-found Faith ; and they seem to sup- 
pose it idle, or even presumptuous, to go further. They 
dread an unsanctified science, and they do justly in 
dreading it. It is atheistic or Pantheistic, arrogant 

* Malebranche. 



KNOWLEDGE. 



91 



and blasphemous ; and irrational, as well as irreligious, 
because scouting the facts and edicts of the Supreme 
and Creative Reason, God. They look upon History 
as an old and profitless calendar. They forget, that it 
is a register of Providence, the story, how a Wise God 
is governing the world that had forgotten Him, and 
that all its events have looked forward or backward to 
the Cross of Calvary, and speed onward the march of 
the race to the foot of that Great White Throne, where 
the Sufferer of the Cross is to be the Judge of the 
world, and the unraveller of all its mysteries, con- 
densing, closing, and appending the infallible Index to 
all its histories, all its incidents, and all its actors. 
They forget, that to the pure all things are pure, and 
that a mind fast rooted in religious principle, and con- 
trolled by the fear and love of God, may move un- 
harmed through all the fields of human bewilderment 
and depravity, uninfected by the errors which surround 
it, and moved only to pity, and zeal, and love of the 
truth, by all the revolting wickedness that it sees dis- 
played in the hearts, and lives, and schemes of mankind. 
The age is one of Physical Science. Far as this 
science is just and sound, it will not contradict God's 
revelation, for one God made both. But scientific men 
have in all ages been prone to generalize too rapidly, 
and have too oft asserted their own theory, as if it 
were God's scientific law. Here has been the collision. 
And men, holding lightly and reluctantly God's word, 
and clutching eagerly and tenaciously any word, how- 
ever rash, that promised plausibly to impugn God's 
utterances, have dropped their Bible, and adored their 



92 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

Philosophy. Investigation went on. The theory, so 
bold and symmetrical, was found to have exceptions. 
The exceptions multiplied. The theory was first sus- 
pected — then scouted — and ultimately left to float 
away, a dishonored wreck, — and, after the exercise of 
a little patience, it was seen that, back of the wreck, 
loomed aloft, intact and entire, the book and the throne 
of Jehovah. So has it been — so shall it be — so must 
it be — by the will of the world's Maker. The schools 
of Science, no less than the halls of Empire, have had 
their Nebuchadnezzars, from whose fall, partial and 
temporary, or final and irretrievable, must come out 
afresh the testimony, once uttered in Babylon, that 
the (rod of Israel is one, " whose dominion is an ever- 
lasting dominion, and his kingdom is from generation 
to generation" — " all whose works are truth, and his 
ways judgment, and those that walk in pride he is able 
to abase."* 

4. It is not the Religion of an open Bible, and of a 
free, unfettered gospel that asks for the Prohibitory 
Index, and for the rituals of devotion in a dead lan- 
guage ; and that would make religious knowledge, 
like Braminism or Phariseeism, the patrimony and 
monopoly of a favored caste. As being Grod's revela- 
tion to all, the pure gospel asks, — it brooks, — it 
challenges, the scrutiny of all. No penal code, no 
flaming Auto da Fe, no band of fierce and steel-clad 
crusaders, no Inquisition frowning in sanctimonious 
despotism over an affrighted land, were made by 
apostles the guardians of Faith and of Evangelical 

* Daniel, c. iy. 



KNOWLEDGE. 93 

• 

Purity. The gospel asks to be sifted. It stands up, 
amid the light of the nineteenth century, not a bed- 
ridden, or a superannuated faith — but the Truth, en- 
tirely and evermore,— the Truth ever young, for its 
years are eternal — and in its origin as old as God, it 
can no more become obsolete, than can He, the Un- 
changeable and the Everlasting. 

5. Meanwhile, let us say, that we have no fellowship 
with those views of religious truth, which represent its 
great outlines, and its elementary doctrines, as capable 
of amendment from the influence of social progress 
and human science. As the research of navigators 
and travellers may make geography more perfect in 
its minor details, but can by no means alter its main 
boundaries, so is it with religious truth. Its continents 
and head-lands, the line of its coast, and its great 
havens, no possible advancement in religious knowledge 
can make other than they are; whilst, on the other 
hand, the developments of Providence, and the unroll- 
ing volume of Prophecy, and the descending influences 
of the Spirit, and the growth of Holiness, and the 
more general diffusion of scriptural knowledge, may 
alter our general views as to the nature and proportion 
of some of the lesser details of this gospel, its creeks, 
its mountain heights, and its tracts yet comparatively 
uncultivated and unbroken.* But Theology admits 
of no uninspired Columbus, the discoverer of a New 
"World of religious truth. Its sphere and orb was 
completed, long since, by the inspired apostles of Him 
" who brought life and immortality to light." 
* See Appendix, Note D. 



94 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

III. And now we have reached the concluding por- 
tion of our remarks : The order of Christian knowledge 
as following and tending to guard and crown faith 
and virtue. Why should it be set here, and not at an 
earlier place, in the rank of Christian excellencies ? 

1. We suppose the reason to have been this. It 
was to remind us of a great truth, that Practical 
Obedience, or Virtue, is necessary, if we would gain 
any great advancement in Christian knowledge. This 
was the law of Grod's school in the times of the ancient 
Psalmist : " A good understanding have all they that 
do his commandments."^ Not only, is such obedience 
an evidence of a sound understanding ; but it is also a 
safeguard for it. No man can keep a healthy and 
sound intellect who is perpetually sporting with known 
error, and wallowing in known iniquity. The very 
conscience may become defiled, and the eyes of the 
soul contract blindness, by disuse and misuse. So our 
Saviour taught the Jews : "If any man will do his 
will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of 
Grod or whether I speak of myself."! We must use 
the light already given, if we would win more. To 
him that hath, it shall be given. On the other hand, 
we cannot long keep " the truth prisoner in unrighteous- 
ness." It pines, shrivels, and at last expires. A truth 
disobeyed, is likely to become, ere long, a truth dis- 
esteemed ; and a truth disesteemed, will very readily 
sink into a truth disbelieved. Virtue must precede 
knowledge. It is the holy, who are led into the 
audience hall, and the council chamber of the Most 

* Psalm cxi. 10. f John, vii. 1*7. 



KNOWLEDGE. 95 

Holy. Truth, when it is disregarded, frets, irritates, 
and perhaps at last cauterizes the conscience, and so 
slips away from the memory ; shaken off, because not 
rightly used to promote a virtuous and honest alle- 
giance to the giver of Truth. So it was, that, in 
Patriarchal times, as Paul teaches us, Idolatry and 
Polytheism began. Men liked not to retain Grod in 
their knowledge, and He went out of their intellect, 
where he was not welcomed and adored. The absence 
of Virtue, procured the abolition of knowledge. If a 
school or a tribe affect and woo Moral Darkness, the 
Sun of Truth and Righteousness may, far as they are 
concerned, go down whilst it is yet noon. 

2. Virtue was, again, made to precede Knowledge, 
in order to protect against a great error, that began to 
be promulgated ere the first apostles had quitted the 
arena of the Church militant, * for the palms and 
thrones of the Church triumphant. Gnosticism, or 
the system of knowledge, — for such is the meaning 
of its arrogant name — claimed in the early Christian 
Church, the highest prerogatives. The Apostle John 
seems especially to aim many of his statements 
against it. It sought to plant knowledge, or the teach- 
ings of its own wild and foul philosophy, as the very 
basis of Faith. Much of the Rationalism and Panthe- 
ism of our own times, proceeds on the same most false 
and most fatal principle. Instead of going out of our- 
selves, to find, by Faith, in (rod's testimonies, what 
He is and what we ourselves are, and to obtain the 
recuperative grace that sanctifies the heart and so en- 
lightens the intellect, this system (as irrational as it 



96 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

is impious) drags the (rod and the oracle and the rev- 
elation into man's self, makes its own purblind reason, 
and its own hasty and crude utterances, in the natural 
state of alienation from (rod and moral blindness, the 
law of judgment, to (rod and to His teachings. And 
thus, our folly is to control G-od's wisdom ; and the 
Most High is to remake Himself and His revelation 
into our likeness and to our arrogant liking. Piety, 
instead of being a regeneration of the man into the 
forfeited image of his (rod, is to be a regeneration and 
a recasting of the only Wise Grod, the Holy One of 
Israel, into the mould of man, the frail, the erring, 
and the dying. And yet, what harmony is there be- 
tween the several shrines and oracles of this reason, 
thus Grod-dethroning ; — as that reason works in me, 
and as that same reason works, in contrary results 
and utterances, in my neighbor? No — such are the 
changes made by successive philosophers, and by con- 
tending heretics, in the knowledge thus enunciated as 
paramount to Revelation, that after a time the mutual 
contradiction produces a universal scepticism. Thus, 
instead of knowledge, as seen exploding Religion ; 
Religion, and knowledge itself, are replaced by utter 
Ignorance, in the matters of the soul and of eternity. 
" Thus saith the Lord" is the emphatic announce- 
ment of Scripture ; and a sound Reason bows to the 
veracity and competency of the Divine Oracle. Against 
that voice of thunder comes up, from these teachers, 
in shrill and petulant contradiction, the "Perhaps" — 
or the hesitating " Who knows ?" And man is ex- 
pected to congratulate himself on the exchange of the 



KNOWLEDGE. 



97 



old, the clear and celestial sun-light, for this earth- 
born gloom. Now, on the principles of reason itself, 
it is evident, that, as to the eternity past, and the 
eternity to come, we, a race who are but of a day, — 
who yesterday were not here, and to-morrow will have 
gone hence, — cannot know anything, but as the God. 
who alone "was, and is, and is to be," shall declare 
it. To forswear Faith, then, is to proclaim, as to all 
that wide and momentous expanse and abyss of 
knowledge, an edict against the race of irreclaimable 
nescience, of perpetual infancy, of hopeless and peren- 
nial stultification. It is taking refuge from the pa- 
rentage and control of Heaven, by suing out, against 
our kind, a decree of irremediable idiocy, and utter 
orphanage. 

When Nahash, the Ammonite, came against the 
city of Jabesh-gilead,* he made the proposition, that 
all its inhabitants should have each his right eye 
thrust out, in sign of subjection and vassalage. There 
was a natural reluctance to accept terms so painful 
and degrading. Why should we be required, instead 
of the blessed and divinely-warranted affirmations of 
Scripture, to accept these sheltering negations of a 
Philosophy of Universal Doubt ? It would fain make 
Human Nature, suicidally to become its own Jabesh- 
gilead, by demanding that we sacrifice not one eye 
but both, — not the bodily vision, but the nobler and 
inner powers of the soul ; and would proclaim, as the 
irreversible law of our nature, the law of blindness — 
blindness to all eternity, blindness to Grod, blindness to 

* 1 Samuel, xi. 

5 



98 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

duty, and blindness to truth ; and would it not be 
eventually blindness to virtue, and blindness to hap- 
piness, as well ? Such science, falsely so called, is, 
then, a knowledge, that ultimately resolves itself into 
the absence of all knowledge. " Professing them- 
selves to be wise, they become fools." Their scepti- 
cism, like the imprisoned spirit in Eastern fable, 
when released from its cell, soars and swells, and 
rarefies, till it becomes a formless pillar of smoke, van- 
ishing into thin air, — a mere shapeless, shadowy and 
intangible Negation. 

3. The gospel does not proscribe knowledge : it 
requires it. It makes knowledge possible to the 
savage, by awakening aspirations where before were 
only appetites ; and by letting out, on every side, the 
horizon of his cribbed and narrow intellect, into the 
wide eternity and the high infinity around and above 
him. Its Missions have carried, with a saintly hero- 
ism, the School and the Press into the snow-hut of the 
Greenlander, into the mud-built kraal of the Hot- 
tentot, and into the cabins overshadowed by the bread- 
fruit tree of the luxurious islands that gem the Pacific, 
—it has gone, thus, to Ashantee, where the graves of 
the dead are watered by human sacrifices, and to New 
Zealand, where the cannibal prepared human flesh as 
his choicest banquet. It not only patronizes and diffuses 
knowledge. It classifies it, as humanity unaided can- 
not do it. The mere scholar puts subordinate qualifi- 
cations and accomplishments into a superior place; 
and sacrifices the indispensable to the trivial, postpon- 
ing to the many things that, at best, are but helpful, 



KNOWLEDGE. 99 

the " One thing that is needful." The Bible puts 
the necessary before the convenient, and the ethereal 
and the eternal before the animal and the temporal. 
It seeks, first, the kingdom of Grod. And does it 
wisely in this ? Hear the dying Grrotius, with all his 
diversified stores of knowledge, and his wide and con- 
summate scholarship, lamenting on his death-bed, that 
he had not, like his humble and illiterate friend, the 
pious John Uri, given his days more exclusively to the 
Bible and to (rod. Hear the dying Selden, the com- 
peer and contemporary of Grrotius, after a life of active 
and enduring influence, as a legislator, and a scholar, 
and a patriot, with all the honors of a wondrous erudi- 
tion, as wielded by the vigor of a masculine intellect, 
clustering around him, yet declaring that of all the 
learned tomes and ancient manuscripts which he had 
read, none brought him comfort and light like those 
words of the apostle : " For the grace of Grod that 
bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching 
us, that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we 
should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in. this 
present world ; looking for that blessed hope, and the 
glorious appearing of the great Grod and our Saviour, 
Jesus Christ ; who gave Himself for us, that he might 
redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto Himself 
a peculiar people, zealous of good works."* And does 
not your own heart, in your better hours, judge as do 
the dying ; and is not the science of salvation felt, 
at such times, to be above all price, and above all 
parallel ? Thus giving to the various branches of 

* Titus, ii. 11—14. 



100 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

knowledge their appropriate place and due proportion 
of honor and precedency, the gospel uses knowledge 
for the defence and diffusion of this faith. See this 
gospel irradiated by the labors of a Boyle, a Pascal, 
and a Newton. See God selecting a Paul, the most 
learned of the apostles, to be the chief writer of the 
New Testament. See, in the Reformation, the at- 
tainments of a Luther and a Melancthon, a Zuingle 
and a Calvin, a Ridley and a Cranmer, made subsid- 
iary to the vindication of Truth. See in modern 
Missions the usefulness and glory of consecrated learn- 
ing in a William Carey and a Henry Martyn, a Mor- 
rison and a Judson ; and is it not evident, that, what- 
ever else the gospel be, it is not the patron or the par- 
asite of Ignorance ? 

4. Physical Science in our day has made rapid 
progress. Religion frowns not on it. But far as 
Physical Science claims to be paramount and sufficient 
and exclusive, it has usurped honors that are not its 
due. It would, in so doing, treat man as a being of 
mere bodily organs, without conscience, without a Grod, 
and without an eternity ; and in so regarding our race 
it robs and degrades us. Religious knowledge comes 
in to prevent the degradation, and to denounce the 
usurpation ; and to supply as she alone can the re- 
quisite aliment and scope for the cravings and inex- 
tinguishable wants of man's soul — his higher and 
spiritual organization. Political Economy is another 
favorite form of science, in our century and land. 
Far as it abjures moral economy, or man's subor- 
dination in the getting and using of wealth, to the 



KNOWLEDGE. 101 

law of brotherly Charity and of Piety, so far, here again, 
Religious Knowledge comes in to remedy the deficiency, 
and to right the wrong. Political Enfranchisement or 
the recovery of the rights of the masses — is another 
most popular subject of thought and debate, flinging 
its watchwords, like flaming fire-brands, over the 
breadth of Christendom. But when was Humanity so 
elevated, as when the Creator assumed its likeness in 
Bethlehem ? When was human misery so comforted, 
as when its heaviest woe was dropped into the cup of 
the Crucified on Calvary ? How is Fraternity to be 
expounded and established, but by bringing men to 
look on themselves, as being in common amenable to 
the Last Judgment, and as being also in common 
interested in the Grreat Propitiation ? Liberty — is 
that a matter of laws merely, and of prisons, — of the 
body and its locomotion, so much as it is of the soul, 
and its enslaving passions, and its earthward and 
grovelling appetites, and its debasing superstitions, and 
its unappeasable fears, and its intolerable despair? 
And where is there true emancipation from the bon- 
dage of these, beside that proclaimed by the Holy 
Spirit, when that Spirit comes down upon the Re- 
deemer's accepted and atoning sacrifice, as sent from 
that Redeemer's celestial and sovereign Throne ? Where 
the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty — the liberty 
wherewith Christ maketh free. 

The gospel it is then that gives the best knowledge ; 
ascertains the relative rank and worth of all knowledge ; 
popularizes, diffuses, and defends it ; and above all 



102 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

gives to man, the sufferer, the knowledge of the 
Consoler ; and* to man, the sinner, the revelation of the 
atonement ; and to the groping captive of sin and heir 
of the pit, announces Liberty and Holiness, citizenship 
in Heaven and sonship with Grod. That Saviour of 
whom prophets and apostles testified is the Ruler of all 
worlds. We honor him best, when meekly, reverently, 
and diligently, we store, with all true and fitting knowl- 
edge, the souls he has ransomed, discern his glory in 
all his works, and seek his scrutiny and benediction 
upon all our tasks. We obey him by seeking every- 
where to diffuse that gospel, which is effectually to 
end among the nations the dominion of Error and 
Ignorance. We bless the race, -and serve the Redeemer 
of that race, by striving to wreathe each discovery and 
each invention, all art and all science, into harmonious 
and devout subordination around that redeeming Cross, 
whence radiates the world's chiefest truth and its only 
hope of everlasting life. And of the stores of wisdom 
which the Spirit unseals in the work and gifts of the 
Saviour, eternity will be but evolving continually new 
wonders and glories. The knowledge merely of earth 
will not bear transportation into the world beyond the 
grave ; or becomes obsolete and worthless there. But 
the knowledge of Christ, is a treasure whose value 
Death only the more highly enhances ; and Heaven 
evermore but the more clearly through its long ages 
reveals, and extols and adores " the love of Christ 
which passeth knowledge." 

Far as any Christian overlooks Christ's interest in 
this present world, as being the Creator of all its ma- 



KNOWLEDGE. 103 

terial wonders and of all the laws of Nature so called ; 
and overlooks Christ's interest in the history of its na- 
tions, as being their Covenanted Sovereign, by his per- 
petual Providence, overlapping and permeating and 
controlling all their transactions ; and overlooks Christ's 
interest in the social blamelessness and usefulness of 
his disciples, in their appointed day and station, as 
being the light and salt of the world ; so far that fol- 
lower of the Saviour comes short of the glory of his 
Master, and of the " knowledge" that should guard 
his faith, and crown his virtue. And in the knowl- 
edge of highest worth, in acquaintance with his own 
heart, and with his Father's word, and with his 
Saviour's love, it is the privilege and the duty of each 
Christian to become daily more versed. He will thus 
be a delighted student in that school, where angels 
are his fellow-disciples, where the lessons are of un- 
mingled and unchangeable truth, and where Grod is 
himself the Teacher. " Who te^cheth like Him," re- 
newing, assimilating, blessing, and finally translating 
to higher than earthly scenes, and better than mortal 
associations, all those who are learners at His feet ? 



LECTURE V. 

TEMPERANCE. 

« AND TO KNOWLEDGE, TEMPERANCE." 

2 Peter, i. 6. 

And what is the Temperance here enjoined upon the 
Christian ? Is the same word, when the enemies of 
drunkenness have inscribed it upon the banners of 
their blessed and peaceful crusade, clothed in their 
application of it with all the rich fulness of meaning 
which belongs to this scriptural term ? Their quiet 
conquests are, indeed, thrice blessed ; but does the 
man who aids in the^n necessarily fulfil to its utmost 
extent, the requirements of our text ? We answer : 
the ordinary use of this word, by them and by others, 
conveys, as we believe, but a fragment of the sense 
which the Holy Grhost intended us to attach to Chris- 
tian temperance. To save himself, and to rescue 
others from the miseries and the sins of the drunkard, 
the member of a Temperance Society consents to ab- 
stinence from all that can intoxicate. On the ground 
of Christian expediency, a religious man thus may 
abridge certain of his enjoyments, and invite others 
so to guard themselves. It is a hedge about his path 
and home, and about the path and home of his neigh- 



TEMPERANCE. 105 

bors. It is a pledge against the maddening bowl 
and its brutalizing influence. But the temperance of 
the apostle goes much further. It refers not to the 
beverage only, but to viands as well. It denounces 
not only the death in the goblet, but the death in the 
charger, the profuse feeder, no less than the insatiate 
drinker. It inculcates upon the disciple, purity and 
restraint in all his gratifications. The word, which 
the apostle here uses, is explained by one Greek writer 
as " self -discipline ■,"* and by another,! as being " ab- 
stinence from evil" as from excess in food, drink 
or enjoyment. The elements of the original word, 
imply a holding in or reining back that is imposed 
upon man's natural appetites. The Psalmist speaks 
of the horse yet scarce tamed from his fierceness, the 
fiery barb of the desert, as needing control, " whose 
mouth must be held in with bit and bridle, lest they 
come near unto thee."$ The word selected by the in- 
spired writer, here, seems to involve this metaphor of 
curbing or bridling. Man's desires are like impetuous 
coursers, champing the bit, and needing to be kept 
back by Reason, and Conscience, and Religion. These 
appetencies are like mettled and fiery steeds, that re- 
quire for their safe guidance the wary eye and the 
firm hand of sober Restraint. Now, Temperance is 
the curb, bringing into subjection all those passions of 
human nature that tend to voluptuousness , just as Pa- 
tience and Meekness check and keep under the fiercer 
passions, or those tending to violence. " Let your 

* Hesychius, in Schleusner Lex. V. T. f Suidas, Ibidem. 

\ Psalm xxxii. 9. 

5* 



106 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

moderation," said Paul,^ " be known to all men." "We 
suppose our text to include that idea, also. It is a 
man keeping himself from all immoderate and undue 
attachments to sense and earth. Christian temper- 
ance, then, sets itself in opposition to the drunkards 
bowl, and the glutton's banquet, and the revels of 
the profligate, and the anxious longings of the covetous ; « 
and against the undue and immoderate desire of what 
is not ours, as well as against the undue and im- 
moderate abuse of what is ours. It includes, thus 
considered, Sobriety, and Chastity, and Moderation, — 
all the forms and all the varieties of a wise self- 
discipline, imposed on man's fierce quest of pleasure. 
Christian Temperance, then, embraces indeed the 
Temperance ordinarily so called ; but it includes also, 
much more : just as the State of New York embraces 
indeed the city of New York, but besides this, the 
metropolis, it takes in a far wider region of field, river, 
and mountain, and thus is spread over scenes of far 
greater variety than those which our streets present, 
or our wharves bound. So the Temperance of our 
text is abstinence from intoxication, but it is also very 
much. more. The Temperance sought and upheld by 
our voluntary organizations is merely a single ward or 
county, in the wide region of moral reformation occupied 
by the other virtue. A man, then, may meet the re- 
quirements of the pledge, so called, totally abstaining 
from aught that should inebriate, and yet come short 
utterly of the temperance here demanded, on the part 
of every true disciple. The voice of Christian Tem- 

* Philipp. iv. 5. 



TEMPERANCE. 107 

perance is, to use the language of Paul to the Romans,* 
in that memorable passage which wrought the conver- 
sion of St. Augustine, — " Let us walk honestly," (or, 
as in the margin — decently,) "as in the day, not in 
rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wan- 
tonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the 
Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh 
to fulfil the lusts thereof." It is a summons to put off, 
and extrude, and expel the self-pleasing brute, and the 
self-exalting fiend, and to put on the self-abasing and 
self-restraining Christ. This grace in its completeness, 
was the subject of the same Paul's appeals before the 
Roman Grovernor, when " he reasoned of righteousness, 
temperance, and judgment to come," and Felix trem- 
bled. The Roman Praetor was pale and cowering, as 
he found himself shut in on either hand by the bold 
testimony of the prisoner-apostle on the one side, and 
the dread echo of his own guilty conscience on the 
other side. He was thus between Ebal and (xerizim : 
and thunder pealed back its response to thunder, and 
Guilt shivered in the commingling blast and storm of 
truth. That Temperance, whose claims thus shot into 
his soul from the burning lips of Christ's servant, and 
were riveted upon him by his own accusing con- 
sciousness, not only forbade his sharing the profuse 
and drunken banquets of his imperial master, Nero, 
but it denounced as well the bribes, which his covetous- 
ness sought for the delay or for the sale of justice, and 
which he would fain have extorted as the price of 
Paul's just liberation ; and it rebuked too, the guilty 
* Rom. xiii. 13, 14. 



108 



RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 



union he had formed with the adulteress, Drusilla, a 
fugitive from her home and from her rightful spouse. 
The Temperance of the Grospel, as one apostle preached 
it before a heathen magistrate, and as another apostle, 
in our text, enjoins it upon all Christian disciples, 
frowns alike on the drunken and the impure, the glut- 
ton, and the lecher, and " the covetous man, who is 
an idolater." Besides enjoining upon a man his duties 
to himself in his own self-government, it also, in rep- 
resenting his duties to his neighbor, envelops in itself 
the substance and essence of the Seventh and the 
Tenth commandments of the Decalogue, and glances 
at the First precept also, or that requiring supreme 
love of our Grod. 

Having thus, then, in the first instance, seen the 
meaning of Christian temperance, let us now 

II. In the next place, ask you to observe the rela- 
tion between knowledge and Christian temperance. 

III. Then, we would, in passing, glance at the bear- 
ing of this Christian grace on the Temperance Refor- 
mation, so called, and 

IV. In the fourth and last place, present the claims 
of Temperance, in the fullest sense of that term, upon 
the Christians of our times. 

II. Let your knowledge, then, said the apostle to 
the readers of his epistle, defend itself by the compan- 
ionship of Temperance. Why, it may be asked, should 
this be selected, and not any other of those clustering 
graces, which go to crown the true believer, and that 
attest the energy and fruitfulness of the Divine Spirit 



TEMPERANCE. 109 

in the work of his moral renovation ? It may be said, 
might we not quite as naturally have looked to hear 
him say : Add to your knowledge patience, or adorn it 
with charily ? But the imputed foolishness of God, 
is wiser than the conceited wisdom of man, and often 
our closer study of (rod's Scripture, will give us to see 
the profoundest truth and beauty in the order that, at 
the first heedless glance, seemed entirely arbitrary and 
unaccountable. 

Let it be remembered, then, that in the first sin of 
our first parents, the knowledge which they sought, 
beyond (rod and against His instructions, was knowl- 
edge which brought with it a sin against the holy 
temperance that had before been the law of Paradise, 
and the accompaniment and defence of primeval inno- 
cence. Whilst in the mind, Pride sprang up, desiring 
the knowledge of good and evil, which should make 
them equal to their Maker and independent of their 
God, there wrought with it, in the body and its 
senses, as the eye gazed on the forbidden fruit, the 
intemperate longings of those senses to be gratified 
with the taste of that prohibited boon. The love of 
a baleful and proud knoivledge, and the indulgence of 
mere bodily appetite, wrought together to make up 
the Fall. "Was it not then fitting, in all this course 
of holy and heavenly knowledge, into which the vic- 
tim of the Fall is again uplifted by the redemption that 
is in Christ Jesus, and by the renewal of the Spirit, 
that he, the scholar, should be perpetually reminded 
of his need to be on his guard evermore, against that 
dominion of the bodily senses into which the Fall be- 



110 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

trayed us ? And was it not well, that lie should be 
cautioned, evermore, as said Paul, to put on Christ 
and to provide not for the flesh ? Was not such con- 
nection of temperance with knowledge, virtually say- 
ing : In Satan's school knowledge brought forth In- 
temperance ; but it must not be so in Christ's school ? 
Knowledge there slacked the rein, nay, threw it off. 
Here knowledge must knit it and bind it on. 

Is it not, again, a fact, sustained by the history of 
the Christian Churches, and the experience of every 
educated people in Christendom, that even when men 
enjoy this G-ospel, their knowledge, both in things 
secular and things spiritual, is but too often perverted 
into a license for casting off the sobriety, and self-con- 
trol, and the high piety and the serene moderation of 
Christian principle ? Is not a palmy civilization often 
found shading a feverish and lawless sensuality ? 
We say, knowledge too often in a community nomi- 
nally Christian, subverts Christian temperance and 
sobriety. We might, at first sight, expect just the 
contrary. It might be said, will not knowledge, and 
a taste for acquiring it, and the books and the lectures 
which facilitate its acquisition, be just the best and 
surest remedies against all brutishness and lawless self- 
indulgence ? So men have expected the book to re- 
place the wine-cup ; and the Lyceum and the Lec- 
ture to close the dram-shop, and to leave the theatres 
tenantless, without patronage or character. But has 
it been so ? Did the British Society for the Diffu- 
sion of Useful Knowledge, much as it promised and 
largely as it hoped from its eminent patrons and col- 



TEMPERANCE. Ill 

laborators, and by its profuse supplies of a cheapened 
literature, draw from the beer-shops their crowd of 
customers, and leave the gin palaces of the British 
metropolis shorn of their glory, bankrupt, unvisited, 
and void ? Far from it : — an unsanctified knowledge 
is, everywhere, and evermore, a self-indulgent knowl- 
edge. Sensuality will thrive under it, and will thrive 
not only in spite of it, but by means of it. Yanity- 
Fair may gather within its walls, alike the university 
and the drinking-booth, and the scholars of the one be 
the gamblers, duellists, and tipplers of the other. 
Temperance, in the large and Christian sense of that 
word, may be subverted by knowledge, and is daily 
and lamentably so subverted. Literature, so called, 
has manufactured furniture and gathered fuel for the 
brothel. Knowledge, indeed, claims to liberalize and 
enlarge the mind, but instead, it may but liberate the 
senses, and give a dispensation to reckless immorality. 
The increase of knowledge, whether it be gained by 
travel, or by books, or by a long life of acquaintance 
with mankind, or by religious instructions and institu- 
tions even, — if these last are not cordially received 
and obeyed, — may be made a dispensation ,■=— a virtual 
Letter of License for casting off the oldest and the 
soundest moral restraints, as if they were but anti- 
quated and worthless prejudices. Was it not thus, 
that Solomon, — after his wide research, that wrote of 
plants from the Cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop on 
the wall, — and in consequence of his growing acquaint- 
ance and his large converse with heathen society, — be- 



112 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

came in his old age a doting conformist to the lewd 
idolatry of Ashtaroth? 

Travel is commended, as expanding the mind, and 
giving a knowledge to be obtained in no other mode. 
Thus, the devout Archbishop Leighton was accustomed 
to express a lively sense of the advantages he had 
gained from his own youthful visit to the Continent. 
But is a like harmless and beneficial result, seen as 
flowing from the knowledge gained by others in their 
travels ? On the contrary, may not our own country 
be seriously prejudiced in her morals and habits, not 
only by the principles which many of the immigrants 
from the old world bring with them, but by those also 
which some of her own sons travelling thither bring 
back amongst us ? One of our statesmen wished 
that an ocean of fire rolled between the Old World and 
the New, to cut off the injurious effects of European 
intercourse upon our nascent liberties and forming 
character. Without sympathizing in his wishes, can 
we not yet, as christian patriots, see much of peril and 
of alarm, in the lowering of the moral tone and the de- 
basement of principle, brought back by some of the 
travelled sons of our land, as their only trophies from 
the banks of the Seine and the Tiber ? They see the 
godless, but glittering dissipation and profligacy of 
Paris or Yienna. Their foreign acquaintance " think 
it strange that they run not with them to the same 
excess of riot" and the visitants also " think it 
strange" if the teachings of the home and the preju- 
dices, as they learn to call them, of their countrymen 
should prevent their so "running" with their accom- 



TEMPERANCE. 113 

plished hosts, into the same gorgeous mazes and en- 
chanted bowers of luxurious indulgence. At the 
richly-spread table of the packet-ship, the youth im- 
bibes, instead of the temperance and sobriety of his 
cottage home, the tastes of a refined epicure. On the 
foreign shore, he learns to deem Republican simplicity 
insipid and coarse ; and he longs, perhaps, for the 
spectacles, the trappings and the titles of a court. In 
the galleries of Europe, he has acquired a taste for Art, 
however luxurious and meretricious may be many of 
her most admired masterpieces. And Modesty is 
tameness, and Virtue is affectation with him. He has 
gazed whilst his brain was in a whirl of giddy, guilty 
fascination, on the shameless twirling of the Opera 
dancer ; and on the foul, simmering caldron of the mot- 
ley masquerade, where Frivolity, and Passion, and Vice 
bubbled together, aifd sent their clouding steam, as a 
rank offence, into the face of Heaven. And have not 
some who had retained, at home, with some degree of 
general confidence, their profession of christian charac- 
ter, learned whilst abroad to neglect the closet, and 
desecrate the Sabbath, and nullify the Decalogue ; 
and brought back to their christian friends at home 
the lamentable spectacle of a soul, whose spiritual 
health had been blighted, incurably and forever, amid 
the pestilential miasma of foreign dissipation — of a 
man, who thought that he had travelled out of the 
reach of Sinai and its fiery law, when he had only 
sunken so deep in the mire of sense as to lose sight 
of the flaming summit, still near to him and still 



114 



RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 



threatening him, with its peals of thunder waxing 
louder and louder ? 

And if the Knowledge won by travel, may so corrupt, 
the knowledge gained by indiscriminate reading or 
by unguarded speculation may be equally deleterious. 
A youth, even of religious training, — and it may be, 
even one aspiring to the tasks and responsibilities of the 
christian ministry, — who should give himself to the 
eager and indiscriminate perusal of the filth, inanity 
and venom that, in the form of cheap literature, runs 
in an incessant stream from the press, could hardly re- 
tain soundness of moral perceptions. To root and 
wallow, but for a few months, in this garbage, would 
threaten to render him hopelessly an inmate of the 
" Epicurean sty." It would be as ruinous as literal 
drunkenness. It would be an intellectual debauch. 
The notions which such a stude*nt forms of happi- 
ness are swinish. His highest conception of heroism 
is brigandage or piracy. And so he, who commits 
himself, without requisite thought and prayer, to the 
heedless collation of the varieties of human opinion, 
and to the survey of the sophistries and endless wan- 
derings of the unguided, unaided intellect of man, is 
little likely to come out of such course of unregulated 
study, as sound in principle as he entered it. 

The Corinthian Christians prided themselves on their 
knowledge ; and on the plea that from this knowledge 
they had learned " an idol to be nothing," — a virtual 
nonentity, — they with an audacious baseness, sate at 
meat in the idol's temple, thus insulting the true Grod, 
evading His commands and scandalizing His churches. 



TEMPERANCE. 115 

Their knowledge "puffed up," but it did not neces- 
sarily, as they supposed, elevate. The human mind, 
like an ill-managed balloon, may bo inflated by its ill- 
won, ill-used knowledge, — and, yet bound to the earth 
by its grovelling nature, and prevented from ascend- 
ing, may be, from its inflation, dashed only the more 
violently into the neighboring quagmires of immorality 
and profligacy. So Grerman Pantheism, now, with its 
vast hoards of erudition, is talking most madly of " the 
rehabilitation* of the senses," and proposing to proclaim 
the overthrow of all morality, and the restoration to 
appetite and to brutal license of all the sway which 
Reason, Conscience, and Religion have hitherto exer- 
cised over them. Knowledge is to eject the lingering 
manhood, the last vestige of immortality, and develop 
the rotund, and lawless, and contented brute, without 
a conscience, an eternity, or a Grod. 

So is it, also, with the knowledge won by long ex- 
perience of the ivorld. A man thus knowing man- 
kind, as it is called, may in his old age become the 
yielding prey to temptations, that shall be based on 
his long and wide acquaintance with human nature. 
He may thus learn to look suspiciously and selfishly 
on all his race, and, like Isaac in his blindness, solace 
himself with the poor consolation of the savory meat 
that his soul loveth, or flee to the inebriating draught, 
or concentrate his trust and heart on the gold from 
which death must soon rend him. 

* A term of the old Roman or civil lavv for the restoration of rights 
long withheld The senses are regarded as heirs long defrauded of 
their just lights and liberty. 



116 



RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 



So is it, even, with the instructions and institutions 
of religion, as ministering to our knowledge, if dis- 
obeyed or perverted. We may from them, only de- 
rive a dispensation for the indulgence of our fleshly 
and earthly senses. Religious knowledge became, 
with the Pharisee, an excuse for his failing to touch 
with one of his fingers, the heavy burden of obedience 
to that law, which he imposed on the shoulders of 
others. His sacred lore sealed him a Bull of Indul- 
gence ; and made the convert he taught but tenfold 
more the child of Hell. So, Saint's holidays have 
been crowded into the Calendar, in the nominal Chris- 
tian Church, and "the knowledge" of the holy men 
and of the sacred miracles of the Church, rapidly in- 
creased, till the Sabbath was stript of its legitimate 
honors, of its sanctities not only, but of its decencies 
even ; and until the idleness thus consecrated on other 
days of rightful toil led the way to all thriftlessness, 
and drunkenness, and debauchery. And so, in our own 
Protestant land, has our religious knowledge saved us 
as a nation from all wrong-doing in our treatment of 
the Indian ? Has the red man of the forest no reason 
to complain, on the contrary, of the Christians, if they 
are so to be called, who from the land of the Bible 
and the church-going bell, came to initiate him only 
in the mysteries of the liquid death, that dropped from 
the worm of the still, and in the oaths, and in the 
frauds, and in the vices of a corrupt civilization ? 
And what has been the plea urged to excuse us ? Our 
cultivation by knowledge, and his uncultivated and 
savage ignorance. Has the Mohammedan of Turkey, 



TEMPERANCE. 



117 



or of far Persia, no right to complain of Puritan New 
England, whose intelligent and church-going mer- 
chants have wafted over the sea, and rolled to his very 
door their casks of New England Rum, — the present 
of Christian civilization in its completeness to the in- 
complete civilization of the Moslem ? A land boast- 
ful of its knowledge in art and science, — of its educa- 
tion and general intelligence and Christian lore — is 
thus sending over the sea to the scenes of the first 
Apostles' labors and martyrdom, the barrelled apostle- 
ship of fiery and murderous Intemperance. And, to 
come yet nearer to our own hearts and frailties, how 
easy is it, brethren, in the ministry of the word, for 
the Christian Pastor to mistake the perception of a 
truth for conformity to its commands. The man sees, 
and brings others to see, the worth and Scriptural 
evidence, and paramount demands of a great doctrine 
or duty of the Grospel ; but, meanwhile, satisfied with 
this, never thinks to ask, if he has laid his own heart 
and his own life, as a pinioned victim, in unresisting 
sacrifice on the altar of that his Lord's law. He 
luxuriates in the sublimer and lovelier aspects of Re- 
ligion, and would have them play like the rainbow or 
the northern lights, on the surface of the imagination ; 
but will not have truth's dark and strong roots shoot 
themselves deep into his own treasured affections — the 
inmost subsoil of his soul. He rejoices in the ideal of 
Christianity, but loathes its practical side. His knowl- 
edge is INTEMPERATE. 

There may then be knowledge from travel over the 
wide main and among many lands, and the men of 



118 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

many tongues, — knowledge from the stored library 
and from converse with its mighty dead, — and knowl- 
edge from long and close observation of mankind, — 
and even religious knowledge gained from the faithful 
pulpit and the Inspired Oracles, so corrupted, or so 
perversely used that its effect is only to subvert moral 
restraint, and to blight the heart of purity, and to in- 
troduce a wide-spread and inveterate social demoral- 
isation that unknits the bonds of obligation and eats 
out the pith of conscience. 

" Take heed how ye hear," cried the One Infallible 
Teacher and Saviour of the race. And we suppose 
that warning to say virtually to all who pursue after 
knowledge: Take heed how ye read in the varied, 
and often frivolous, and often baleful productions of the 
human intellect. Take heed how, and in what mood 
— prayerless or prayerful, heedless or obedient — ye 
peruse, even my own pure utterances. Take heed 
how ye see, and make a covenant with your eyes, that 
they turn away from beholding and desiring the van- 
ity which cannot fail to meet your vision. Take heed 
how you think, for out of the secret chambers of 
meditation, the covert labyrinths of thought, comes 
forth at last the overt act, and there stalks out to the 
noon-day light, the unveiled character. Knowledge 
should minister to temperance. Let not your knowl- 
edge minister only to license and folly, and error, and 
sin, and death. 

Much is, by some, most confidently predicted from 
the wide diffusion of education, and the cheapening of 
the issues of the press. The newspaper visiting 



TEMPERANCE. 



119 



every door, and the school enlightening every neighbor- 
hood, and worldly lore climbing every pulpit — all are 
spoken of as if "Wickedness and Misery were to vanish 
from their glance. Has it been so ? "Will it be so ? 
On the contrary, a mastery of worldly knowledge 
without religious principle, — or an intermixture of 
overlooked error in a great increase of knowledge, — or 
a heartless and searing familiarity with disobeyed 
Scripture, may leave the heart but more possessed 
with earthliness, and less susceptible of control. " The 
commandment has come" with fuller light and clearer 
knowledge, and "sin has revived," as said the lament- 
ing apostle. If grain be borne to a famishing people, 
it stays their hunger ; but if the ergot be in the grain, 
those who are fed, are likely to be also palsied and 
mutilated. Has there been no instance, in which the 
harvest of knowledge has borne to the garners of an 
irreligious nation, or of a formal hypocritical church, 
only the mental aliment that poisoned and dismem- 
bered the body corporate ? Knowledge has its ergot. 
And woe to those who greedily, indiscreetly, and indis- 
criminately devour it. 

Having thus, then, seen how knowledge may sub- 
vert Christian temperance, we proposed 

III. To glance, in passing, at the bearing of this 
Christian grace on the Temperance Reformation of our 
times. "We said that the temperance of the G-ospel 
included this last, but it embraced also very much 
more. For the amount of good attempted and accom- 
plished by this reform, every patriot and every Chris- 
tian should rejoice. The Bible does not, indeed, like 



120 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

the Temperance Society, make it the imperative duty 
of the Christian, in all times, and in all circumstances, 
to forego the use of the beverage, that taken in excess 
may induce drunkenness. But christian expediency, 
as taught in the New Testament, may require it of the 
Christians of a certain time, and of a land greatly ac- 
cursed with a free use of what may intoxicate, to 
forego their abstract rights from a wise regard to their 
own infirmity, and a kind desire of their brother's 
preservation. Churches may not make entire absti- 
nence a term of fellowship ; for they are not entitled 
to institute new conditions of Communion. But they 
may, and must protest against, and discipline those 
who heedlessly and heartlessly aid to swell a general 
scandal, and aggravate a national curse. In some of 
the friends of the Temperance Reform there may have 
been errors to be lamented, and amongst these may be 
named a disposition to desecrate the Sabbath, and to 
depreciate Christianity and the Christian Church, — a 
weak love of mutual applause, and, above all, a resort 
to secret societies, with their oaths, and signs, and 
watch- words. But whilst condemning all these, it is 
yet true that the penitentiaries, and the alms-houses, 
and the homes of the land, and even its sanctuaries, 
needed the Temperance movement. The Book that 
shows intemperance, in the histories of Noah and of 
Lot, working so disastrously — that traces to the glut- 
tony of the Cities of the Plain, and to their " fulness 
of bread," their awful sin and doom — that shows Bel- 
shazzar and his Babylon feasting to drunkenness on 
the night of the Persian irruption, and of the resound- 



TEMPERANCE. 



121 



ing fall of the Chaldean Empire, — that paints the 
chosen tribes in the wilderness sitting down to eat and 
to drink, and rising up to idolatrous play, and in the 
latest and worst days of their history as a monarchy, 
represents their Princes as strong to mingle strong 
drink, but weak in counsel, and in valor, and in pub- 
lic virtue, — the Book that thus portrays and condemns 
intoxication and excess, and excludes the drunkard 
from the kingdom of Grod, does not teach its reverent 
and docile students to think lightly, or speak scof- 
fingly of a movement, that, on either side of the At- 
lantic, has done so much to arrest personal and social 
ruin, to restore the fallen, and to stay the feet that 
were ready to slide, brought back many a prodigal to 
despairing parents, and restored to a wife more than 
widowed, and to children worse than fatherless, the 
husband and father disembruted, clothed, and in his 
right mind. But we suppose that the best friends of 
Temperance will yet find that, to give it permanence, 
it needs the broader basis and the deeper root of a re- 
ligious movement ; and that here, as in so many other 
earthly reforms, the controlling motives — the effectual 
lever, must rest on some stronger and firmer basis than 
earthly considerations. And let not the ardent pane- 
gyrists of Temperance forget, that a man may renounce 
drunkenness, and yet remain the enemy of Grod, and 
the heir of perdition. Neither Judas nor Ahithophel 
is charged with intoxication. Neither Voltaire nor 
Rousseau was a drunkard, although Paine was. "Was 
Temperance, in them, necessarily the sum of all virtue ? 
No. The atoning Cross and the renewing Spirit remain 

6 



122 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

yet the one pathway to Heaven, and mere abstinence 
from a single form of moral debasement constitutes 
but a slender shred of moral adornment and defence, 
if it be pleaded as a man's sole and sufficient warrant 
for his admission to the general assembly of the 
heavenly world. He will need another " wedding gar- 
ment," who is " called to go in to the marriage-supper 
of the Lamb." Drunkenness is enough to damn a 
man ; but the mere absence of Drunkenness is by no 
means enough to save him. Christian Temperance, 
even, in its further reaching claims, is not in itself 
evidence of a meetness for Heaven. It is but one of 
a train of developed moral excellencies, springing out 
of the root of true faith- — one of the fruits of the re- 
newing Spirit. 

IY. We have now reached the last division of our 
subject ; the claims of this Christian grace, taken in 
the wide and comprehensive sense which Scripture at- 
taches to it, upon the disciples of our times. It is 
necessary, then, to true piety. The knowledge and 
love of God cannot lodge in a heart crowded and drag- 
ged downward by debasing, and carnal, and sinful 
pleasure. God is the maker of both the body and the 
soul. He deems both wronged by those who cast off 
the restraints of His law of Temperance. Such trans- 
gressors are charged with dishonoring' their own 
bodies* And they are warned as to fleshly lusts, in 
their influence on the inner man, that these war 
against the soul.t Communion with G-od, the duties 
of the closet, and the accepted and profitable attend- 
* Rom. i. 24. f 1 Peter, ii. 11. 



TEMPERANCE. 123 

ance on the sanctuary require that the man who at- 
tempts these, dwell not in the company of the foolish, 
and in the tents of the transgressors, nor roll wicked- 
ness under his tongue as a sweet morsel, nor regard 
iniquity in his heart. If men are Christ's, they are 
crucified with Him to the flesh and the world. 

It is necessary as well to christian usefulness. The 
man who would be really and widely useful must 
have an unselfish sympathy. Now, of this, the lovers 
of pleasure are notoriously and necessarily destitute. 
Few things more rapidly and surely bring a seared 
callousness over the heart than the habitual pursuit of 
gross and selfish pleasure. The actor, it may be, as 
the scene shifts, drops before such lovers of pleasure in 
the crowded Theatre, snatched quick into eternity, but 
he must be carried to his agonized family and his 
lonely death-bed ; it may not mar or delay the sports 
of the children of worldly gayety. Sternly, fiercely 
resolute, though the wing of the destroying angel has 
just brushed them in his flight, — they would forget 
care and compel joy upon the very scene where the 
boards are yet warm from the victim's limbs, writhing 
in their mortal agony. In the conflict of our times, 
again, with the self-sacrificing zeal of some Romanists 
on the one hand, and with the Utopian but enthusias- 
tic benevolence of some errorists or sceptics on the 
other, Christians must (to maintain their due promi- 
nence and pre-eminence in the ranks of reform and 
philanthropy) become more than ever self-denying, and 
not at all subject themselves to the imputation of seem- 
ing " lovers of pleasure, more than lovers of GodP 



124 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

To secure, again, the time and the pecuniary resources 
required for wide usefulness, it is requisite that the 
church waste not her leisure or her wealth on worldly 
and vain gratifications. Eras of revolution have been 
to a people loving their country, eras of heavy and 
yet cheerfully endured taxation. Our earth is passing 
into a crisis of moral revolution ; and the revenues of 
the church, and the time of Christians, must yield 
more largely their tribute to meet the emergencies of 
the impending conflict. But christian temperance is 
needful still more to christian happiness. True felicity 
is found most readily, when not sought for imme- 
diately and for its own sake. Much that the world 
calls such, and as such seeks, is wrongly styled Happi- 
ness ; and when reached, her name and looks are 
found those of Disappointment or of Remorse. For 
what is, to a rational and mortal and immortal being, 
pleasure, in the justest sense of that term ? Is it the 
deity of Pagan legends, with reeling steps, empurpled 
face, and bloodshot eye, — careless, and bloated, and 
brazen in his shamelessness ? In the days of the 
Stuarts, England to such a deity raised her May-poles, 
crowned with garlands and circled with dances. Read 
in contemporary dramatists and annalists, the effect, on 
the morals and character, of such amusements. To 
such a deity James I. should have dedicated his Book 
of Sports, enjoined to be read from the pulpit, and 
requiring the stern Puritan to forego a part of his 
Sabbath, and to give the church-yard of Christ's sanc- 
tuaries, on the afternoon of the hallowed day, to the 
gambol and the revel and the masque. Read in the 



TEMPERANCE. "125 

story of Baxter's youth the character and piety of such 
Sabbath revellers. Was true pleasure for the individual 
or the family so won ? Put, in the days of the later 
Stuarts, as an instance of true and waking felicity, 
the household of Philip Henry, orderly, reverent, and 
guarded with the sermon, and prayers, and catechizing, 
and singing, and all their Sabbath-day employments, 
— against the drunken bouts, the rude, rough wit, the 
profanity, and the reckless indulgence, of Henry's 
acquaintance and neighbor, the Lord Chancellor Jeff- 
eries ; — and was it the law-biding saint, or the lawless 
Cavalier, that was most blest, even for this life and in 
their several chosen employments ? You look in, 
upon the godly father amid his children all godly, and 
you hear him exclaiming, as the Sabbath evening 
shades shut down around them, as at that hour he 
often exclaimed, " If this be not Heaven, it surely is the 
nearest way thither, and the likest to it.'''' And your 
conscience reiterates the justness of the sentiment. 
Yes, where the self-restraint was, Heaven already shot 
anticipatory gleams ; where there was no self-restraint, 
the brightness was livid. It came from beneath. It 
shed an ominous and ghastly ray. 

And so, in our own times, is it the youth, returning 
jaded, and guilty, from the Sabbath excursion, pur- 
chased perhaps too often by pilferings from the till — 
is it the parent, dragging back his fatigued and 
irreligious household to an unblest home : — or, is it 
the Sabbath-school teacher, or the pious parent, worn, 
but not fretted by the sweet toils of the day passed in 
the sanctuary, — who is on the Sabbath most serenely 



12(> RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

and most truly blest ? Do you say, how can such 
restraint, by any possibility, be blest, or even tolera- 
ble ? We answer, true happiness is, like Purity and 
Truth and Honor and Heroism, and aught that is 
really good, a law and restraint to itself. It shrinks 
and braces itself up from the degradation and con- 
tamination of an uncontrolled course. It sees in 
God's Book, among His most dreaded denunciations, 
the threat of the removal of all restraint — that removal 
which is, by some, so coveted : " So I gave them up to 
their own hearts' lust" is God's declaration in the 
Psalms, of His sorest earthly visitation on a guilty 



# 



peopl 

It is necessary to National ivell-being and pros- 
perity. When, some years .since, an officer in com- 
mand of a ship of the United States Navy, visited an 
island of the South Seas ; — and violently restored 
there, against the will of the converted natives and of 
the Sovereign, the old and Pagan licentiousness, and 
maligned and assailed the Christian Missionaries, his 
own countrymen, who were there laboring ; what man 
of right feeling did not for his country's honor and for 
his country's interest, denounce so shameless and 
high-handed a wrong ? In the recent violent expul- 
sion of the Orleans branch of the Bourbons, from the 
throne and soil of France, is not the Christian re- 
minded of similar violences inflicted on Tahiti and not 
as here, disavowed by the government under whose 
flag it was done ? Was there no evidence, then re- 
vealed to the observant mind, that the God whose 

* Psalm lxxxi. 12. 



TEMPERANCE. 127 

name often ushers in treaties, but whose existence is 
often forgotten by diplomatists, is looking in upon the 
guilty cabinets that persecute His Gospel ? Was 
there nothing to remind us, in the clamor of that 
Revolution, when the throne was borne, a dishonored 
wreck, along the tumultuous streets, that the dust 
shaken at the Master's bidding from the feet of a 
despised, and rejected Missionary of that Master, may, 
dust though it be, avail to scatter, when Grod chooses, 
like summer chaff, the loftiest thrones and the oldest 
dynasties ? With us national power has not yet been 
thus used. And if we might thus use our national 
fleets to trample down moral restraint abroad, is it 
not evident, we might be in turn the victims, by a just 
retribution : and who would wish himself and his 
kindred to be thus the prey of the lawless for- 
eigner ? Succeeding expeditions, under Bolton, and 
under "Wilkes, were most honorably contrasted, in 
their treatment of converts from heathenism and of 
their Missionary pastors, with this wretched and loath- 
some spectacle. We allude to it, only to suggest what 
would be the national destiny of a people who should 
adopt such policy, and the inquiry whether a giddy, 
inebriated and profligate people, shedding abroad giddi- 
ness and profligacy, — it matters not what their strength 
or their numbers or their valor, — can expect long to 
maintain self-government and free institutions ? 

If a nation be, like our own, eager and earnest for 
the sustentation and the diffusion of freedom, are we 
not doubly pledged to those morals of Christian Tem- 
perance which are necessary as a part of the basis of 



128 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

enduring liberty ? Take away the restraints of Prot- 
estant Christianity, and substitute even another form 
of Christianity, as Rome presents it. Give up the Pu- 
ritan Sabbath, with its principled quiet, and its sacred 
order — receive, in exchange, the Carnival of Rome, 
with its principled misrule and consecrated disorder. 
Both seasons are intended to commemorate the same 
Saviour : — but the one is all redolent of christian tem- 
perance ; the other as abhorrent of it ; — and what 
far-sighted patriot could hesitate, as to the relative in- 
fluence of the two institutions on the security, and 
freedom, and prosperity of the nation ? 

2. But what does christian temperance require, and 
what does it forbid ? In fashion, then, it censures all 
that is wasteful, all that trenches on immodesty, and 
all that feeds pride and starves alms-giving. In dress 
and in furniture, in the table and in the equipage, it 
prescribes simplicity without affected singularity, 
plenty without luxury, liberality without ostentation, 
and the spirit of those who eat to live, rather than the 
tastes of those who live to eat. It enjoins a chas- 
tened moderation in the day of prosperity, and a sus- 
tained meekness and trustfulness in the day of adver- 
sity, — a holding of the world loosely, but a holding 
our own inclinations and desires tightly, and under 
vigilant control. It does not prescribe austerities for 
their own sake, or. as in themselves meritorious. The 
maceration of the body, the severe penances, practised 
in the ritual of La Trappe, or by the first anchorites 
of the Egyptian desert, it does not find paralleled, or 
commended in the New Testament. Yet, it regards 



TEMPERANCE. 129 

Paul's charge, that the body be brought under subjection 
to the soul. " Keeping my body under," as says the 
apostle, " lest I become a castaway." It sees in that 
body, in the case of each Christian, " a temple of the 
Holy Grhost." Rome shows its Loretto, — a sacred 
house, the chamber of the Virgin Mary, which it fables 
to have been carried in the air from Syria, and planted 
down where it now stands, in Italy. The Gospel 
teaches us to see, in the believer's body, the true Lo- 
retto, a house that shall be translated into a higher 
world, and rebuilt there, another and yet the same, 
and therefore to be honored, even in its present and 
earthly uses. 

In the soul it recognizes the rights of a new master, 
the Deliverer, who has emancipated it from the tyranny 
of its old despot and destroyer, the Father of Lies. 
And the powers of that soul are consecrated to a chris- 
tian allegiance. " Lord 'Will-be- Will," according to 
Bunyan's allegory, holds Man-soul for its Aew sov- 
ereign in christian vigilance, and with christian decision. 

3. It may be objected, And are no amusements al- 
lowable to the disciple of Christ ? The book of Ec- 
clesiastes is perhaps misquoted in defence of worldly 
enjoyments. Misquoted, we say, for the earlier por- 
tion of that book, instead of containing what were 
really Solomon's parting counsels to his reader, but 
records his erring principles and endeavors, in his 
earlier and misguided pursuit of happiness. To quote 
its opening statements and sentiments, as if they were 
the final result and settled principle of Solomon's ex- 
perience, is to mistake the details of the preceding dis- 

6* 



130 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

ease for the recipes of the subsequent recovery. But 
does the Bible forbid all cheerfulness, and joyousness ? 
Does true Piety scowl from under the knit brow, on all 
that savors of gladness, and hope, and peace ? By no 
means. Our Saviour was present at feasts. One of His 
apostles, (it was Matthew,) after being called to forsake 
his receipt of custom and follow Christ, gave a ban- 
quet to his friends. Our Saviour honored a wedding- 
festival at Cana, in Gralilee, by a miracle there wrought. 
He watched the sports of children, and grounded on 
them one of His parables. He praised the beauty of 
the lily, and the blithe trustfulness of the bird. Surely, 
He who did all this, and who as the Grod of Provi- 
dence is yet waking the melodies of the grove, and 
flashing splendor along the skies, painting the tulip 
and perfuming the leaf of the rose and the heart of 
the violet, is not disposed to inhibit to man all joy 
and delight in the use of the senses which He has 
formed, %nd in the contemplation of the objects with 
which He has surrounded His creatures : Nature, and 
Art, and Society, all may minister to the Christian's en- 
joyment. But Heaven is his chief point of attraction 
even here, and whatever is alien in spirit to that world 
of light and purity, he must dread. His pleasures should 
be therefore rational, and not unduly exciting, and not 
in excess — the relaxation, and not the business of life. 
An easy test, as to the lawfulness of many forms 
of recreation, might be found in inquiring, Should I 
be willing, were Christ bodily and visibly present, to 
pursue the amusement under His meek yet searching 
glance ? Could the modern theatre, or the modern ball- 



TEMPERANCE. 131 

room either, be visited by a Christian, if this test were 
once applied ? Take each, with its ordinary accom- 
paniments, and its general results on the minds and 
religious character of its visitants ; and could we look 
to see our Saviour there stand by us with approval 
beaming from his eyes ? Can we imagine Him, had 
He visited at the time the court of Herod, watching 
with benignant smile the young and fair girl, the 
daughter of Herodias, as in her dance she pleased her 
father and the chief lords of Gralilee ? Even, had 
not the prophet's gory head been the grim prize of her 
gracefulness, can we conceive of Christ's sympathiz- 
ing in her exhibition ? Weddings in the East, of 
old were, and yet are, frequently celebrated by the 
dancing of hired women. The Almehs of Egypt, and 
the Bayaderes of Hindostan, thus display themselves, 
as contributing their portion to the amusements of the 
wedding-festival. Imagine such an accompaniment of 
the nuptial festivity at Cana in Galilee, commenced 
beneath Christ's eyes, and would you not almost expect, 
that the scourge of small cords, which did its work so 
vigorously in the Jewish temple on the sellers of doves, 
would have done an anticipatory work there ; — thus 
avenging the insulted purity of the home, as He after- 
wards vindicated the outraged majesty of the Sanc- 
tuary ? If worldly pleasure were innocuous and evan- 
gelical, as some represent it, it ought certainly to fit 
those practising it, better than it actually does, for the 
infirmities of age and the tremendous realities of the 
death-bed. But are such votaries of pleasure cheered 
in sickness and soothed in decay, and in the near view 



132 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

of the grave, by their reminiscences of the years given 
to levity and folly ? Read the language of the gay. 
and witty, and accomplished Chesterfield, as he de- 
scribes his listlessness, and weariness, and wretched- 
ness, in the closing scenes of life. See the Madame 
du Barry, who had so flaunted in gay and guilty 
splendor in the court of Louis XV.; as she is dragged, 
shrieking, in her last years, to the Revolutionary guil- 
lotine, the least self-possessed and the most frantic of 
its many female victims. And can you doubt more ? 
Read, above all, the stern language of the New Testa- 
ment : "If any man love the world, the love of the 
Father is not in him." "Whose god is their belly, 
whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly 
things." " Of whom I have told you weeping, they 
are the enemies of the cross of Christ. "Whose end 
is destruction." " The belly for meats and meats for 
the belly, but God shall destroy both them and it." 
"To be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually 
minded is life and peace." " Be not conformed to the 
world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your 
minds." " Set your affections not on things which 
are on the earth, but, on things which are above, 
where Christ sitteth at the right hand of Grod." "No 
man can serve two masters, ye cannot serve Grod and 
Mammon." " What concord hath Christ with Belial ? 
Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of 
devils. Do ye provoke the Lord to jealousy ? Are we 
stronger than He ?" Christian sobriety and modera- 
tion, then, are requisite to our discipleship. Have we 
them ? Is the Church elevating or sinking her stand- 



TEMTERANCE. 133 

ard of Christian attainment as to this grace ? Does not 
the age require the former and prohibit the latter ; and 
demand tint Christians, whilst loving the men of the 
world with a tine philanthropy, should protest against 
the ways of the world with more of holy decision ; 
and for every new advance in knowledge become more 
weaned in holy self-denial, from vanity, and sense, 
and sin, and from " all that is in the world ;" from " the 
lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride 
of life," all which, as the Apostle John testifies, "is 
not of the Father, but is of the world ?" 



LECTURE VI. 



PATIENCE. 



U AKD TO TEMPERANCE, PATIENCE." 

2 Peter, i. 6. 



Patience is, in the estimation of some, a mere 
drudge among the virtues ; and regarded as being, if 
necessary, yet but servile in her character. In Scrip- 
ture, she is a queen, magnanimous and dignified. It 
is a criticism of Calvin, that the order, in which these 
several christian graces are here presented by the 
Apostle of the circumcision, must be regarded as 
evidently but arbitrary, because patience is made in 
Peter's catalogue to precede charity, when, in truth, it 
must spring from and succeed that grace. A man 
must, in the exercise of an evangelical charity, love his 
God and his neighbor, to bear uncomplainingly ad- 
versity from the one and injury from the other. But 
let us turn aside to inquire more closely, whether the 
arrangement of these several excellencies of the chris- 
tian character, is indeed, as alleged,* thus without 
sufficient cause ; and whether a just connection be not 
traceable amongst them. They are not, we think 
that it will be found, presented as independent, the 
one of the other, — entirely distinct and readily divisi- 



PATIENCE. 135 

ble, like the several pearls of a necklace, that may be 
parted without injury and assorted at pleasure. They 
are rather like the members of the body, though dis- 
tinguishable, yet mutually dependent, and all needful 
to the perfection and symmetry of the frame, and all 
knitted in the fittest arrangement, the one to the other. 
To be truly a Christian, a man must in some degree 
combine them all. Some true disciples are, indeed, 
more distinguished by one and some by another of these 
jewels, and some of a Christian's individual graces may 
in massiveness and splendor far surpass others ; but all 
of them, the ruby of knowledge, and the pearl of faith, 
and the diamond of charity, belong to the princely and 
priestly array of each son of Grod, who, as king and 
priest, shall follow the Lamb in His glory. Faith, the 
first enumerated by the apostle, cannot exist without 
charity, the last. Their order does not then determine 
the date of their origin in the renewed soul. But the 
several traits of true piety seem here named by the 
All-wise spirit of inspiration, as they are needed, the 
one to become the complement of the other which has 
preceded it, and as its presence serves to correct the 
excesses, or to supply the deficiencies, of that which has 
gone before.* Thus we have seen virtue, or practical 
excellence, to be required as a remedy and counterpoise 
against the exaggeration of a barren and notional faith. 
Knowledge is next demanded, to rectify the rudeness 
of what some would represent as all-sufficient, an un- 
taught and unreflecting and unprincipled Virtue. By 
an unprincipled virtue, we mean, of course, not a 
* See Appendix, Note E. 



136 



RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 



virtue reckless of all moral principle, but one not 
guided by intelligent and definite principles. For a 
man's views become soon the man's acts. Principles, 
ignorantly and vaguely held, are not permanently 
efficient either to incite or to control. His theory 
becomes soon the discipline of his life — " as he thinketh 
in his heart so is he." Thus the intellectual passes 
over readily into the practical. A mans knowledge or 
misconception of some great truth becomes a blessing 
or a curse, not only to himself but to all his neighbors, 
who may pass within the range and wind of his influ- 
ence. Thus Rousseau's eloquent theories of the dig- 
nity and purity of man unsophisticated, in his state 
of Nature, became soon a law of education and revolt 
to his own France not only, but to all the republicans 
of Europe. Knowledge, then — (or right views and 
large views of things as they are) — knowledge, we say, 
is needed as the stay of virtue. And, then, comes 
Temperance, to balance the excesses of a perverted 
and self-indulgent knowledge. And now, in our text, 
we see it enjoined, as if to correct the acidity and 
acridity of a sour and eccentric temperance, that it 
should be grouped with patience. 

How it is, and why it is, that the disciples of 
Temperance, or self-restraint, are immediately com- 
mended to the cultivation of a gentle and forbearing 
spirit, will, as we think, appear, if we but advert to 
the petulance which all rigorous and abstinent self- 
control is apt to foster. The man who succeeds in 
denying, within himself, the promptings of Indulgence 
and Voluptuousness, is prone to become in the inter- 



PATIENCE. 



137 



course he holds with the world without, harsh in 
imposing on his less guarded neighbor the law of his 
own example ; and thus becomes, whilst shutting out 
the pleasurable, but too ready to let in the irritable. 
Thus, during the great fast of the Mohammedans, the 
Ramadan, observed by severe abstinence from food 
through all the hours of daylight, travellers have noted 
the querulous and contentious spirit that seems for the 
time to reign through a Turkish city. And it was, 
perhaps, not without alliance to the same great law of 
human weakness, that after the forty days of fasting 
which Jonah, in common with the Ninevites, probably 
had observed, that he is represented by Scripture as 
becoming at the sight of (rod's mercy to the doomed 
heathen, " greatly displeased" and " very angry." He 
gave vent to fretfulness even in his devotions, and pro- 
voked from his Grod the qvfestion, " Doest thou well to 
be angry ?" Those who closely and vigilantly curb 
their own natural impulses to indulgence, are easily 
made impatient by the spectacle jof the reckless follies 
and un governed sins of those around them. A recent 
British Missionary* speaks of the devotees of Hindooism, 
whose austerities are most rigid, and who proclaim 
superiority to all passion, as being notorious for " a 
general irritability." The ascetic, of all times and of 
ill forms of faith, has been subject, and not without 
some plausibility, to the imputation of sourness. Turn 
over the monkish illuminations, preserving the features 
of some Romish worthy, eminent for his macerations 
and fastings, as the saint of his diocese or of his age, 
* Buyers' Recollections of Northern India, p. 270. 



138 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

and how often do the lineaments bespeak a stern 
violence or a querulous discontent. The austerity of 
an habitual self-restraint was seen in Jerome, among 
the Fathers. So in Calvin, as compared with Luther 
among the Reformers, there was more of abstinence 
from what are accounted allowable relaxations and 
from all genial enjoyments ; and there was also more 
of severity of temper and of an iron inflexibility of 
character. Calvin's immense and astounding industry 
required a singular temperance to sustain it, and 
hence, from the spirit and temper thus fostered, he 
was ever, even by his most admiring disciples and his 
most attached inmates, rather revered than beloved. 
Richard Baxter and Andrew Fuller, each eminent for 
devotion and assiduity and usefulness, and for a con- 
sequent abstinence from much that to others seemed 
needful relaxation, had, as the result of this jealous 
abnegation of pleasure, at least occasional manifesta- 
tions of an austerity, that cut short the fruitless visit, 
and denied remorselessly to mere ceremony, or to idle 
curiosity, any large share of the time, which they so 
valued and so redeemed. When summoned to reprove 
weakness or folly, the Kettering pastor was said to be 
often overwhelming in his severity. 

But patience, here and elsewhere so earnestly en- 
joined, is at times travestied and counterfeited. It is 
not a supine indifference to truth, or a tame subser- 
viency to arrogance, that the Scriptures enjoin. Let 
us then, imploring of Him who is its great Teacher 
and Exemplar His aids, to know and practise this 
grace aright, consider 



PATIENCE. 139 

I. What christian patience is not ; 
IE. What it is; 

III. Its relations to other graces of the religious 
character ; 

IV. The motives which should induce us to culti- 
vate it ; and 

Y. The means of its attainment. 

I. The patience of the disciple of Jesus is not, 
then, stoical apathy, nor acquired or affected obduracy 
to all physical suffering. The old sophists of Greece, 
who denied the existence of pain, in order thus to pro- 
claim their own superiority to the sensitive and com- 
plaining around them ; — the Hindoo Yogee, swinging 
suspended by his feet from a tree, and with his hair 
trailing downward over a smoking fire ; — the Simeon 
Stylites, who to the wonder of his contemporaries in 
the early, but already corrupted, ages of Eastern 
Christianity, held amid the sultry heats of summer, 
and the storms of winter, in the noon-day blaze and 
in the gloom of midnight, his place unmoved on the 
narrow summit of a tall column for successive years, 
as an act of exalted piety ; — and the monkish inmate 
of La Trappe, denying himself the exercise of speech, 
and the indulgence of converse even with his brother 
recluses, until, as was said of one of them, after attend- 
ing for a time in the infirmary of their edifice, on the 
death-bed of a younger brother of the order, he dis- 
covered for the first time, his own relationship — the 
tie of kindred binding the silent watcher to the silent 
sufferer, only when, days after, he read on the grave- 
stone the name and age of his patient in the hospital, 



140 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

and found him to be his own son : — none of them all 
(according to our views of evangelical patience,) can 
claim the honors of that real and celestial grace. It 
is not affected or studied insensibility to pain, if that 
pain be self-inflicted, rather than sent and apportioned 
of G-od ; or, as Paul describes it, if it be the " bodily 
exercise which profiteth little," — an uncommanded 
cross, and therefore a cross caricatured and unblest. 

2. Nor, much less, is christian patience a meek in- 
difference to all error and wickedness in the world 
around us. Such tolerance is often connivance at sin, 
and confederacy with Hell. If that were requisite to 
spiritual meekness, the apostles were the least meek 
of mankind ; for their indignant denunciation of idol- 
atry and sin made them to be charged with having 
turned the world upside down. But yet some Chris- 
tians form to themselves an idea of christian patience, 
that swallows up all christian boldness, decision, and 
constancy. The old law required love to be shown to 
a brother by not suffering sin upon him, and in the 
new dispensation the churches were commended that 
would not suffer the doctrines of Jezebel, or the claims 
of false apostles. It was not a pious patience that 
Eli showed when he left unrestrained the profligacy 
of his sons, Hophni and Phinehas ; nor does the Bible 
praise, as godly forbearance, the false tenderness and 
the guilty tolerance that David, in like manner, 
showed to the brutish Amnon, and to the plausible 
and heartless Absalom. The standard of christian 
piety adopted by some, which is all softness and re- 
pose, would have no room for men like the lion-hearted 



PATIENCE. 141 

Knox, who did, under (rod, so thorough and good a 
work, before a licentious court, and a frowning nobility, 
and a raging priesthood, for the Scottish nation. It 
would show no sympathy for the bearing of the noble 
daughter of that great reformer, Knox — the child of one 
man of God, and* the wife of another — Mrs. Welsh, 
when she went to ask from that profane and arbitrary 
sovereign, James L, the liberation of her eminent and 
devout husband, John Welsh. On being told by the 
King, that if she would persuade her husband to de- 
sist from his rebellious preaching, her request should 
be granted, the Christian woman, indignant at the 
thought of such treason to a higher monarch, is said 
to have raised the apron she wore, and holding it up, 
replied : " Please your Majesty, rather than ask him 
do that, I would catch his head there." She rather 
chose to witness his decapitation, a martyr like the 
Baptist, than to see him for life and freedom selling 
the Truth and Heaven. To the silken views of chris- 
tian patience which some favor, here would seem to 
have been no patience. To us, on the contrary, Pa- 
tience shines forth in such a spirit at such a time, 
triumphant. It is the patience that dares brave all 
anger, and loss, and suffering ; but that dares not sac- 
rifice truth or duty, or make the fear of Grod to vail 
to the fear of man. And, if we derive our views of 
this grace from the apostle of the Grentiles, or from 
his Lord and Master, it will seem that true meekness 
may coexist with the utterance of sharp reproofs, and 
may pour forth the most lofty and indignant denuncia- 
tion. The same Paul, who among inexperienced dis- 



142 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

ciples was forbearing, and as he describes it, showed 
himself " gentle, even as a nurse, " # could, in other 
scenes, take the tone of injured innocence and insulted 
majesty, and bid the Philippian magistrates come and 
release him, and resolutely appeal to Csesar, where his 
own rights, — those of a despised apostle, — were about 
to be remorselessly crushed between the two mill-stones 
of an intriguing Jewish priesthood on the one hand, 
and of a Roman praetor's love of popularity on the 
other. And when duty required it, he could denounce 
Elymas, and resist a fellow-apostle, Peter, though that 
honored man had been in the Lord before him. He 
left it in charge to christian ministers, on the one 
hand, that they must not, as the servants of the Lord, 
strive, and yet on the other, those who sin these pas- 
tors must rebuke, before all ; and reprove, rebuke, and 
exhort with all authority. In his Master's example, 
the meekness that hid not its face, as a victim, from 
shame and from spitting, was yet blended with the 
authority and fearless truthfulness that branded Herod 
as a " fox," and Judas as a " son of perdition," and the 
Pharisees as whited sepulchres, and a generation of vi- 
pers ; whilst two of his parables painted them as fraud- 
ulent and remorseless husbandmen, that had murdered 
the heir to seize the heritage of which they were 
justly but the renters. In the temple he wielded the 
scourge against those who had made that sacred ed- 
ifice a den of thieves, and blasted the fig-tree, as an 
acted parable of warning to fruitless pretensions in 
religion. Follow Him throughout His career, from his 

* 1 Thess. ii. 1. 



PATIENCE. 143 

first to his second Advent. As a Lamb he bleeds and 
is passive, in the atonement, under the wrath due 
to our sins. But wait for the Second Advent ; — and 
then, as Prophecy paints the scene, nations and their 
kings quail before the wrath of the Lamb, come the 
second time " without sin, unto salvation" and unto 
judgment. Now some, in their portraitures of chris- 
tian gentleness, forget all this. They would wrap up 
and bind close, in that soft, lamb-like fleece of an un- 
complaining gentleness, both the rod of apostleship with 
which Paul proposed to visit the erring Christians of 
Corinth, — and the sword of the magistrate, (rod's min- 
ister waiting on his appointed work of restraint and 
retribution ; and going yet farther, they would dis- 
card, as obsolete, or unreal, the thunder-bolts of the 
avenging Grod. More tender than is the tenderness 
of Jehovah himself, and in their mercy unmerciful to 
the letter and spirit of Scripture, they would (savage 
in their mistaken defence of mercy) throttle and 
strangle, in the gripe of their rude criticism, the worm 
that shall never die. They would let in a"n ocean of 
false sympathy and false exegesis, that should extin- 
guish the unquenchable fires of the pit. " (rod is not 
slack," says an apostle, " as some men count slack- 
ness." But these reasoners confound patience with 
slackness, and leave to the Monarch of the universe 
the character of the Drone Kings of early French his- 
tory ; as if He were a mere Do-nought, too slow, in- 
different, and feeble to awe by his frown, or repress by 
his justice, the transgressors and troublers of his Uni- 
versal Dominion. 



144 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

II. "What, then, is Christian Patience? We un- 
derstand by it, "A calm endurance of evil for God's 
sake." Now, evil is both physical and moral. Phys- 
ical evil, coming either by Grod's appointment or 
by man's act, is that falling especially on the body. 
Moral evil is that occurring by Grod's permission, and 
affects chiefly the soul. ■ Physical evil includes pain, 
want, disease, and death: moral, errors, sorrows of 
soul, and wickedness, in all its varying shades, and 
in all its hideous shapes. Now, some evil may thus 
be occasioned directly by the act of God, and other 
evil may be merely the act of wicked and unreason- 
able men, only permitted and overruled by God. Far 
as the moral evil is an error affecting general happi- 
ness, or a wickedness perilling the individual soul, 
true piety may sternly denounce the wrong, whilst it 
bears patiently the personal suffering which that 
wrong occasions. Taken in this largest sense, patience 
includes the grace of meekness, from which however, 
in other portions of Scripture, it is distinguished. 
Meekness rs the quiet endurance of wrong from man, 
and Patience (when thus considered apart from meek- 
ness) is the endurance of woe appointed of God. 
Moses was the brightest example of one grace, in the 
Scripture, which pronounced him the meekest of men, 
because of his great serenity under the many contra- 
dictions, that he endured from the perverseness of the 
chosen tribes. Job, in his unequalled afflictions from 
God, and in his unmurmuring submission to them, at 
least in their first stages, is called the brightest ex- 
hibition of the other — the most patient of mere men. 



PATIENCE. 



145 



But in our text, we suppose the word patience to in- 
clude both meekness and patience strictly so called. 
It is the quiet endurance of evil for God's sake. 
That it is endured, implies that the evil is not self- 
invented and self-inflicted. The self-torturing Flagel- 
lants, who went through Catholic Europe in the mid- 
dle ages, rending their flesh with scourges, were not 
Christian penitents ; for it might be asked of them in 
Christ's name, " Who hath required this at your 
hands ?" Or if the physical evil be the effect of our 
own utter neglect, the passive endurance of it is not 
sufficient to make the sufferer a patient Christian, in 
the truest sense of those terms. The cottager, quietly 
bearing the showers that beat upon him through the 
rents of a hovel, which his own slothfulness has left 
to decay and ruin, is deserving of censure quite as 
much as of commiseration ; and the husbandman, 
gentle and unrepining under the pressure of a famine 
which his own shiftlessness has produced, is a kindred 
instance of sluggishness rather than saintliness. Such, 
sorrows, so incurred, are borne, it is to be feared, for 
sloth's sake, rather than for God's sake. Christian 
prudence requires the patient and confiding disciple, 
whilst submitting to inevitable evil as God's appoint- 
ment, yet not to invite or endure causelessly what 
may honorably and uprightly be avoided. It bids the 
persecuted of one city to flee to another city. It does 
not authorize escape, or peace, as purchased by col- 
lusion with godless errors or by submission to any im- 
pious laws of a human magistracy ; and here christian 
patience must obey God, rather than man, and shows 

7 



146 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

itself, not by obeying the wrong law, and thus evading 
the penalty, but by breaking the law to obey God, 
and then braving for man's sake the penalty of con- 
fiscation, incarceration and* death, if exile cannot re- 
lease from it. 

Against moral evil it must bear patiently its bold 
protest ; but the want of immediate effect to that pro- 
test, and the presence of that evil in the world, and its 
apparent and temporary triumph, must not shake the 
Christian's patient reliance on the wisdom and jus- 
tice of the Divine Providence. For Christian patience 
is essentially hopeful. It must quietly wait for the 
salvo.tion of God. The New Testament presents, 
therefore, hope and patience, as closely entwined. So 
is it also, in the New Testament represented as bound 
up with christian diligence, or industry. The Bible 
tells us of "patient continuance in well-doing," and 
sends the pleader of the promises and the keeper of 
God's precepts to learn of the husbandman, who, hav- 
ing sown the seed, must have long patience for the 
harvest. Christian patience, then, it will be seen, in- 
cludes meekness under injury, submission to adver- 
sity, hopefulness in seasons of darkness, perseverance 
amid difficulties, and constancy in times of sore trial. 
It requires a subjugation of our native fretfulness, re- 
vengefulness, distrust, and rashness. It shows us 
heroism as possible, not only for the martyr, grappling, 
as a doomed man, with some great error or wrong ; 
but also amid the petty annoyances and daily discom- 
forts of the workshop and the exchange, the mother's 
nursery and the teacher's school-room. It shows like 



PATIENCE. 147 

conflicts, here too, possible, and a like crown, here too, 
attainable. Superior strength in the brute race is 
generally attended with superior gentleness ; the ox 
and the elephant are less quarrelsome than the cur 
and the scorpion: and Christians are to show in like 
manner, the superior might of their souls and of their 
creed, by longer endurance. 

III. We have seen its needfulness to fill out chris- 
tian temperance. Let us observe, now, its relations to 
other graces of the religious character. All those 
graces which in our text are made to precede it, — 
faith, virtue, and knowledge, — are, together with tem- 
perance, made more or less to depend upon it ; and so 
is it also with the graces, which in the apostle's enu- 
meration follow it, — godliness, brotherly kindness, and 
charity. 

Ours is a day of religious effort, for reform at home, 
and evangelization abroad. Look at the need of 
patience to preserve the spirit of the laborers in work- 
ing order, and to render their endeavors successful. 
Mackintosh praises Wilberforce as being a model re- 
former, because of his immoveable sweetness, as well 
as his inflexible persistency. But many good men 
assay, without this patient sweetness, to reform others 
by the virtual tyranny of harsh and unreasoning 
criminations. They resort to moral coercion, where 
they should use moral suasion. There are indeed 
social reforms which, besides mere moral persuasion, 
may, at the fitting time, invoke the aid of the statute 
and the penalty against the tremblers of the common- 
wealth. But each method, the gentler and the sterner, 



148 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

is beautiful in its fitting season. In a republic, laws 
must, to be abiding, have more or less a basis in the 
precedent efficacy of moral argument and appeal in 
informing and arousing the public conscience, and in 
creating a sound public opinion. And as the farmer 
plucks not the half-grown and acid fruit, but waits 
for time, and the sun-beam and the rain-drop, to round 
and mellow and ripen it ; — nor puts his sickle into the 
field where the stalks are yet green, and the ears moist 
and unfilled, so must social reform patiently adjust its 
measures and bide its time, and do everything in its 
own order. It must prepare the soil and scatter the 
seed ; and, then, wait and pray for sun and shower, 
ere it raises the sickle, much less lifts the flail. It is 
so in individual amendment, or the conversion of the 
solitary inquirer and penitent. When Scott, the com- 
mentator, was groping his sincere and prayerful way 
from the dread errors of Socinianism, towards those 
evangelical views, of which he was in later life so 
distinguished an ornament and champion, John New- 
ton avoided, in the early stages of the correspondence 
opened between them, the controversy which the learner 
would fain have invited. It was not the time. He 
waited — was patient and hopeful, and gentle, — and 
Scott, one day to be the commentator, was born into 
the church of Christ, a fellow-witness for the great 
truths' that Newton loved. It is so in moral and 
political reform, as dealing with large masses of men. 
France in her first Revolution began, too early and 
precipitately, the propagandism of Democracy among 
nations who were as yet unfit for it. The patriots of 



PATIENCE. 149 

our own country, have they never hoped too soon and 
hoped too much for other lands, when as yet the peo- 
ple of those countries had not the moral culture and 
religious principle, that should precede and sustain 
free institutions ? The wise reformer is a patient- 
man. And not only does he allot the required time, 
and await the natural order of the changes which he 
desires ; but he estimates soberly the relative value of 
the alterations which he is seeking. He would not 
hazard political convulsions, involving certain evil and 
uncertain good, for the removal of lighter and tolerable 
evils, nor risk the setting all the forests of a mountain- 
range on fire, in the simple endeavor to scorch one 
poor snake in his den. 

2. Again, as a preservative of faith and knowledge 
and godliness, patience is indispensable. It was said 
by the illustrious philosopher Newton, that, if he had 
accomplished anything in science, it had been " by 
dint of patient thought." The believer in Scripture, 
who would feed, from its full pages, his faith and 
knowledge and piety into richer development and 
greater vigor, must be patient in searching — patient in 
pondering and comparing, — and patient in praying 
over those sacred lines. Injury has at times been 
done, and that by truly good men, to the honor of the 
Bible, by attaching the precipitate interpretations, 
which their over-hot and impatient haste had made, to 
the pages of unfulfilled prophecy. They have mis- 
reckoned the calendar of the Divine dispensations, 
and, then, because He did not appear at the unwarrant- 
ed appointment which they in their temerity had 



150 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

undertaken to make for Him, some at least of their 
precipitate and impatient disciples have, on the fail- 
ure of the expected era to dawn when it had been 
predicted, renounced impatiently the verity of the 
records thus impatiently interpreted ; and the head- 
long interpreter became thus the sudden convert to 
infidelity. So, the followers of Sweden borg, weary of 
awaiting, with due and -Christian patience, the last 
judgment, and the general resurrection, as the Scrip- 
ture promises them, have professed to find in the poor 
and petty incident of their leader's illumination, in a 
certain year of the last century, the accomplishment 
of all these vast and glorious predictions. The world 
was judged when the Swedish noble received his 
spiritual enlightening. Tired of waiting till the ful- 
ness of God's times permitted them to hear along the 
heavens the wheels of His descending chariot, and to 
catch the gleam of His approaching throne, they have 
set themselves down, in their unscriptural impatience, 
to belittle and antedate and precipitate the great Fact 
on which,, as on a hinge, revolves all History, — the last 
audit of the race before its Maker and Judge. 

A similar spirit of impatience leads others to set 
themselves prematurely to the task of reconciling the 
statements of Scripture with each new fashion in 
Natural Science. Much was said but recently of As- 
tronomy and its galaxies, and the star-dust, out of 
which new worlds were even now in process of crea- 
tion. Some would, perhaps, among Scripture inter- 
preters, have set themselves down on this assumed 
fact, to hew Revelation into harmony with it, alarmed 



PATIENCE. 



151 



lest the Gospel should not keep itself abreast of the last 
philosophical hypothesis. But a little patience has 
dispersed the fancied fact. It proves a mere figment, 
and the Rosse telescope has saved impatient exegetes 
from the necessity of volunteering, as some perhaps 
would soon have done, to serve on the forlorn hope of 
finding star-dust in the Old or New Testament. So 
Phrenology, a few years since, in the hands of some 
of its champions, was held to have disproved the Scrip- 
tural doctrines of Human Accountability and Deprav- 
ity. A man was not answerable for the shape of his 
skull, or the character, morally, of his soul. In short, 
new and yet immature sciences, or transient theories, 
are perpetually assailing the Scriptures and the pulpit, 
because the pulpit and the Scriptures do not lend 
themselves as advertising journals to the newest fan- 
tasy, and because they will believe, in their stolid ig- 
norance, that Gfod understood the nature of the race 
and the history of the world which He himself had 
made. Yet each score of years almost a fresh assault 
is made on the verity of Scripture, by some critic or 
sciolist, who cries out, to use the image recently em- 
ployed by a French statesman, that he is encountering 
the persecutions of a Galileo, when in fact he is only 
attempting to repeat the frenzy of an Erostratus.* 
Let Science become only mature, and modest in its 
maturity, and it will be found, as it has eventually 
in ages past been evermore found, that none of its true 
discoveries have shaken, by one hair-breadth, the state- 
ments of this volume. Let Science delve, it will not 

* M. Thiers in the Constit. Assembly. 



152 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

jar the integrity of our foundations ; let it soar, it can- 
not go past the visions of Prophecy, and the state- 
ments of the Giver and God of Prophecy. It is an 
error, to sit down at the call of every apprentice-sci- 
ence, yet raw, and imperfect, and impertinent, to rec- 
oncile Revelation to it, before the science has become 
reconciled to, and consistent with itself. 

3. Again, virtue, and godliness, and charity, — all 
practical christian excellencies, need patience for their 
development. " Confidence," said a British statesman, 
" is a plant of slow growth." True, consistent piety 
is also such, and needs long and meek study of God's 
providence and Word to refine and perfect it. " Pa- 
tient continuance in well-doing," is urged by the apos- 
tle. In the shape of perseverance, it is a most im- 
portant element in national and individual character. 
How much is possible to this, the missionary history 
of Carey and Eliot may show. We see the latter in 
his old age reducing to letters a barbarian language, 
before unwritten, and after having mastered its seem- 
ingly intractable elements, at the close of his Indian 
Grammar writing, " Prayer and pains through faith 
in Jesus Christ, can do anything." In nations we see 
how much the Celtic races have suffered, compared 
with the Teutonic, from their lack of persevering and 
patient energy in active enterprise. In the patient 
persistence in matters of sentiment and of hereditary 
custom, they are indeed not defective, but eminent. 
In active effort, however, those of the other race have 
outrun them, by more resolute perseverance in follow- 
ing up the course of exertion, upon which they have 



PATIENCE. 



153 



once entered. Carey said, modestly, in "liis old age, 
when his grammars and versions of Holy Scripture 
were almost a library in themselves, " I can do one 
thing — I can plod" Men, families, nations, have 
pined and dwindled because they could not plod. 
They were ard.ent, impulsive, and adventurous, but 
lacked the persisting patience that mocks at difficulty, 
and that, under God, commands success. A want of 
patience, in the slow, toilsome study of truth, prefer- 
ring the discovery and announcement of mere novelty, 
as a more compendious road to fame, has been the 
.secret origin of many of the extravagancies of Ger- 
man Neology. And, in the mart, as in the schools, " a 
making haste to be rich," the impatience that spurns 
slow gains, and sneers at plodding industry, has kindled 
in individuals, and in whole communities, a rage for 
speculation, that, like some fiery fever, has ruinously 
exhausted, whilst it most fiercely excited its victim. 
And even thus is it, in the highest interests of the 
Christian. In the soul's struggle heavenward we do 
well to recollect that he " who endureth to the end" 
shall be saved, and that by faith and patience we in- 
herit the promises. 

IV. More briefly, let us now consider the motives 
that should persuade us to be patient, as Christians. 
Far as patience includes meekness under wrongs of 
our fellow-men, we must forgive, or we may not hope 
ourselves before God to be forgiven. Christ laid the 
axe where no earthly reformer would have dared to 
place it, at the root of revengefulness. The christian 

law of morals gropes in the heart of every petitioner, 

7# 



154 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

oft as he prays, and it bids him pray without ceasing. 
We are warned again, that in yielding to impatience 
and anger, we cease to possess our own souls ; and as 
is darkly intimated, Satan takes hold of the deserted 
rudder and wields the ungoverned helm, and drives 
before him the infuriated and imbruted man. Cain, 
had he but curbed his impatient envy, need not have 
bequeathed his name and warning to all times, as the 
first murderer and fratricide ; and Christ told us that 
he who hates his brother in his heart is already, in the 
germ and essence, a murderer ; — the first act of Cain's 
sin is begun within him. Far, again, as patience in- 
cludes submission to the Divine appointments, let us 
remark, that our trials are lessened by serene meek- 
ness and resignation. God lightens and removes them 
more early, and they do not so deeply wound and em- 
poison the soul. But he who frets and fights against 
God, in the language of ancient prophecy, like a bul- 
lock unaccustomed to the yoke, drives the deeper into 
his own flesh the goad against which he vainly kicks. 
"We are to remember, too, the necessity of this grace 
to success and influence with our fellow-men. It is 
the patient perseverance in well-doing that builds up 
consistency, and influence, and weight of character. 
We are, again, all to remember our own unworthiness 
before God, and our liability to pay ten thousand 
talents, for which infinite and endless torments would 
be no sufficient amends ; ere, in our fretfulness, we chide 
man harshly, or murmur bitterly against our God and 
His Providence. Nor is it unfitting, that we remem- 
ber how much of mercy and kindness there is in 



PATIENCE. 155 

God's allotments ; — and how, by the general presence 
of affliction, (rod has provided in every sphere, the 
most obscure and secluded even, a scene where He 
may be glorified, and where the power of His religion 
and grace may be illustrated ; — and how, out of such 
trials meekly borne, He weaves the confessor's wreath, 
and the martyr's crown, and makes the blood of his 
slain servants the seed of his Church, whilst the 
wrath of man is forced to praise Him, and the re- 
mainder of wrath is restrained. Are we tempted to 
impatience and anger with some erring and injurious 
fellow-mortal ? Let us test the old Puritan dilemma 
in such a case. The offender is a Christian, or a 
child of Hell. If already, or yet to become, the first, 
we shall in Heaven not remember with pleasure, re- 
vengeful and retaliatory wrongs against one of our 
brethren and of Christ's people. If an enemy of Grod, 
and an heir of His wrath, he is soon to endure more 
than man can inflict, and the- bar to which he is rush- 
ing is one at which strict Justice and unforgetting 
Memory preside. Let us dread snatching into our 
hands the sceptre of Him who has said, " Vengeance 
is mine," and then pronouncing rash and false judg- 
ment, rooting up the wheat with the tares, and mak- 
ing sad the heart of the righteous, whom God has not 
made sad. The question of the Judge of all the 
earth to the over-fretted patriarch, has much of dread 
significance : " Wilt thou also disannul my judgment ? 
Wilt thou condemn me that thou may est be right- 
ous ?"* Much of our impatience is a virtual disan- 

* Job 3d. 8. 



156 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

nulling of (rod's ' decisions, and a distinct intimation 
that his forbearance is wanting in righteousness. 

V. We see why patience is to he desired, but how is 
it to be attained ? "We answer, by the Scriptures,— 
and prayer, — and communion with Christ. 

— By the study of Scripture. We see there glorious 
examples and inspiriting promises, and the most 
solemn warnings, and the most apposite models and 
precepts. We see the kind and gracious end of the 
Lord in the trials of Job ; and how it was not in vain, 
that David bore the railings of Shimei ; and that Heze- 
kiah spread before the Lord the letter of Rabshakeh, 
the spiteful and blasphemous emissary of the Grentile 
king. We see in Moses, forbidden to enter Canaan, 
the effects of a rash word upon a career otherwise 
lustrous with its eminent meekness ; and are warned 
by an apostle how great a matter a little fire kindleth, 
and how untameable an evil is the tongue when once 
set on fire of hell. Scripture is thus a gallery, rich 
with the most animating portraitures and vivid battle- 
pieces of those who by faith wrestled and conquered. 
It is an armory all hung with the shields of the 
promises, that in the hands of earlier combatants foiled 
every arrow, and quenched the burning dart, and sent 
Satan back frustrated and shamed and spoiled of his 

prey. 

— Let us pray. Does the spirit in us lust to envy ? 
And would envy swell into wrath, or blasphemy, or 
murder ? The apostle's reply is, " He," our G-od, 
" giveth more grace." And he gives it in answer to 
prayer. The apostles, when bidden by their Lord 



PATIENCE. 157 

often to forgive the offending and injurious, prayed, 
" Lord, increase our faith." Repeat the petition. 
For its teacher yet lives to be its answerer. Seek also 
a just and lively sense of your own provocations and 
inconsistencies ; and sin, thus felt as a burden before 
G-od, will make the burdens imposed by the sins of 
others and your own adversity, to seem of less weight 
and grievousness in their pressure upon you. 

— Above all, be in communion, much and habitually, 
with Christ. You see your Saviour in Gethsemane 
unwilling to decline the cup which the Father had 
appointed Him. You hear on the cross his dying 
breath expended in intercession for his murderers. As 
even a Rousseau in his infidelity looked on that scene, 
and contrasted it with the death of Socrates, he saw in 
the departing moments of Jesus " the death of a G-od." 
Stephen saw it more perfectly and nearly, and it was 
to him a mantle of conformity, and he prayed like his 
Lord for those who wrought his own death. The mantle 
of Elijah passed long since from the earth. But the 
mantle of Jesus yet floats over each praying disciple. 
Win it and wear it. For his sake and for the honor 
and love of his Spirit, be meek and lowly, and patient, 
much-enduring and long-forbearing, not easily pro- 
voked, and avenging not yourselves. 

Are you zealous for Christ's house ? Let your zeal 
be tempered with patience. Else like Uzzah, you may 
profane the ark you would steady by too rash a hand. 
Some, in their impatient and frenzied zeal, would seem 
to count it a sacred duty, not only to jostle but to 
overturn that coffer of the divine testimony, and to 



158 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

drive and goad even to madness, the oxen that draw 
the sacred vehicle. 

If the law of forgiveness of injuries be inwrought by 
Christ's command into every Christian prayer, im- 
plicitly or expressly, as a necessary condition to its 
success ; — if patience be thus scriptural and blessed, 
having the sanction of Divine precept and Divine 
example ; — what shall be said of the law of honor, 
though prevalent in lands nominally Christian ? Do 
not its votaries, though calling themselves men of 
honor, herein u glory in their shame" ? In the duel, 
that baptism of blood, an incensed Honor professes to 
lave away its stains, petty or grave, in the gore of a 
brother. But shall God hold guiltless those, who by 
resorting to this rude and bloody vengeance virtually 
condemn as insufficient and unsatisfactory the law of 
the land as not reaching or remedying their case, and 
the law of (rod, as not entitled to stay their murderous 
hand ? "What shall be thought of the prospects at the 
Judgment day, of the man who virtually says ; My 
reputation is worth more than the life of my neighbor ? 
God guards that life with His dread sanctions. Society 
and human law hedge it round with all securities. 
But from me and my just rage, and the avenging of 
my quarrel, nor God nor man shall shield that forfeited 
life — the object of my just reprisals. Has that man a 
safe conscience, who goes into the field intending to be 
a suicide or a murderer, and perhaps to unite both 
crimes in the one rencontre? Is he the friend of 
Order and Freedom and Virtue who puts his endorse- 
ment upon the reputation and practice of professed 



PATIENCE. 159 

duellists — men who, from steadiness of nerve and re- 
morseless assiduity in practice, have become dexterous 
in the massacre of their fellow, and in consequence 
are comparatively unpunished in their profligacy and 
fraud and falsehood ? Every duellist, however pro- 
voked, and though but for a single hour entering the 
field, or even but sending a challenge to invite mortal 
combat and which in fact ends without blood-shedding, 
yet aids to sustain this guilty class of professed assas- 
sins, and to hold back from their Cain-like heads the 
storm of general contempt and indignation, that would 
else pierce even their shamelessness and compel their 
exile into some land of Nod, like the refuge of the first 
murderer, where their presence would be less a nui- 
sance and a curse to society. Above all, may any man 
trifle with the lives and earthly prospects, and perhaps 
the spiritual destinies, of the widow and orphans 
whom his rash, brief rage is to sentence to years of 
bereavement, and want and temptation ? How will 
he encounter the eye of that Judge who hath declared 
that no murderer hath eternal life ? The sinner who 
denies thus forbearance to his fellow, may expect 
from a just (rod that judgment without mercy of 
which his own conduct is an example. 

To the laborer and the sufferer, to the student of 
prophecy and ths perplexed investigator of God's 
mysterious dispensations in Providence ; to the Chris- 
tian offering prayer the answer of which seems long 
delayed ; to the youth aiming at high usefulness, and 
the saint groaning after higher holiness ; the precept 
is alike applicable and important; "In your patience 
possess ye your souls." 



LECTURE VII. 



GODLINESS. 



« AND TO PATIENCE, GODLINESS." 

2 Peter, i. 6. 



It was a beautiful saying of one of the old Fathers, 
when, addressing himself to God, he exclaims : " Thou 
hast formed man, thy creature, for Thee, and he can- 
not be at rest until he have come again unto Thee." 
True piety, by which we mean conformity to God, and 
communion with God, is indispensable to man's hap- 
piness, and it is, too, as inseparably necessary to man's 
highest virtue. 

We see those who mistake here, and overlook this 
great essential principle of virtue. They imagine, 
that a trampling down of low and sensual appetites, 
and a checking of fierce and vengeful passions : — a 
self-control, that shall give the man dominion over the 
violent and malevolent affections of his nature, on the 
one side, and over the luxurious and self-indulgent ap- 
petencies of his nature on the other side ; — a temper- 
ance and a patience, that render him amiable, tolerant 
to others, and himself not intolerable, in human soci- 
ety, must, in their union, constitute him a finished 
paragon of moral excellence. If a man have, then, 



GODLINESS. 161 

attained these, or, in other words, have achieved the 
temperance and*the patience, which precede the grace 
enjoined in onr text, these moralists imagine their dis- 
ciple to stand, thus temperate, and thus patient, — 
self-controlled, and self-possessed, on the pinnacle of 
human perfection, where further advance in goodness 
is well nigh impossible. But, as Augustine exclaims, 
man, formed for his Maker, needs the favor, and the 
society, and the moral image of that Maker, to be 
truly blest or truly good. He must add " godliness ;" 
or else the first want of his being is left ungratified, 
and the first law of his creation is rudely violated. 
Framed at first in the likeness, spiritually, of his Grod, 
he has, by the fall, lost it, yet like a crystal vase 
shattered into fragments that retain no more the sym- 
metry of its original form, and of which the pristine 
lustre is obscured and bemired by the slough into 
which it has dashed ; but of which the splinters may 
yet glitter, and the very shreds yet witness of a har- 
mony and proportion now destroyed : — so, there are in 
man's wishes and aspirations, in his dim hopes, and in 
his haunting fears, traces of what he was, and omens 
of what he needs yet again to become. To use the 
lano;uao"e of Leighton : " The mind of man retains a 

CD <ZJ O 

sort of shadow, — confused notions, as it were, of the 
good which it has lost, seeds of its kindred s&#." # 
The temple, in its ruins, bears yet traces of the divine 
Architect, and of the plan on which that Architect 
wrought. A class of ancient philosophers, some of 
whose disciples Paul met at Athens, the Stoics, taught 

* FitelecL ii. p. 9, ed. Scholefield. Quoted in Knox's Remains, i. p. 325. 



1£)2 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

men to aim at moral perfection, in the entire subjuga- 
tion of the passions. This would mot be possible, 
were it desirable ; — for, our Creator implanted them, 
and they are ineradicable. It would not be desirable, 
were it possible ; for, that Creator, good and wise, im- 
planted them for ends, like Himself, both wise and good. 
It would be as safe, that we should attempt to dispense 
with the bodily organization, — and to see without the 
eye, or to hear without the ear, G-od sees and hears 
without such organs as ours. But man must see and hear 
by them, from the law which his Framer imposed upon 
him at his first creation. A stoical indifference would 
ill qualify man for the place which his G-od assigned 
him, as lord of the meaner orders of being. Desti- 
tute of all passions and likings, he would be a mere 
King Log, odious, and useless, and contemptible. Or, 
the endeavor to extirpate passion might, as in the 
case of some of the Stoics it did, teach man a posi- 
tive ungodliness. Some of these men, in their fancied 
superiority to all change and woe, believed themselves 
to be equal or superior to their gods. Some of the ascetic 
and mystic writers, in later and christian ages, have 
fallen insensibly into a similar error. They would, — 
instead of teaching man, by the wise and godly con- 
trol of the senses, to secure knowledge, and goodness, 
and happiness, and usefulness, — -teach him to cancel 
and extirpate those senses. As if these steeds, which 
God himself has provided and yoked to the human 
soul, as its motive power, in its present state of exist- 
ence, ought to houghed, rather than harnessed. It 
is Boodhist, rather than Christian theology, which 



GODLINESS. 



163 



teaches men to look for excellence, in this moral 
Nigban, this state of dozing and misty apathy. It 
would leave the aspirant after goodness, but to be like 
Gal Ho, — when Christ's apostles were before him, and 
their life at stake, — in stately indifference, " caring for 
none of these tilings.'''' Or, it would render its disci- 
ples, like Nabal, stunned into senselessness, " when 
his heart died within him, and he became as a stone." 
True virtue is not insensible ; and true patience is 
not apathetic ; but, on the contrary, full of all feeling, 
though this feeling may be as quiet as it is strong. 
And true godliness teaches not the renunciation, but 
the consecration of our affections to (rod's service and 
glory, like an Isaac, dedicated indeed on the altar, but 
not slaughtered there. 

I. What, then, is the godliness here commended ? 
Looking, then, to the sense of the term here employed 
in the Greek original, it is piety or the fear of God, — 
that veneration of the Most High, which leads to 
homage and obedience. Or, if we look to the ele- 
ments of the English word, which our translators have 
here employed, and most happily, to render it, it is 
godlikeness : a resemblance to, and sympathy with 
Him, the Greatest, Purest, and Best of Beings. As 
we have before seen, the apostasy of Eden has shat- 
tered, and defaced, and obscured this likeness and 
portraiture of Shaddai within the soul. It must be 
restored : the end of Religion is such restoration. As 
the moral quality in His own nature, on which God, 
in His appeals to us, ever lays the chiefest stress, is 
His Infinite Purity and Goodness, and ho delights to 



164 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

proclaim, as his title, that He is " The Holy One of 
Israel," our chiefest aim should be a renewal unto 
holiness. It is one of the affecting proofs of our 
estrangement from Him, and from all right views, of 
Him, that when, even in christian lands, we speak 
admiringly of a fellow-man as the Godlike, we mean 
to ascribe to that fellow-mortal, rather majesty of 
carriage or splendor and power of intellect, than purity 
or goodness of soul. While the term saint,— the word 
which, borrowed from the Roman tongue, our version 
of the New Testament employs to describe the men, 
who as Christians are partakers, in some measure, of 
evangelical holiness, — has been used in christian 
Britain and in our own country, by many who profess 
to believe this gospel, only to express intensest con- 
tempt for those to whom they apply it ; as if the en- 
deavor to become holy Christians, were itself proof of 
sanctimonious hypocrisy, and as though all godliness 
must be, and is, on the part of man, but hollow pre- 
tence, — a mask, the very use of which betokens de- 
ceit and guilt. Yet, the God of the Scriptures reveals 
Himself almost on every page, not as claiming merely 
loyalty and distant reverence from His people, but as 
inviting them to near and free access, and installing 
them into the place of children, and clothing them 
with a distant resemblance to Himself by virtue of 
tlieir new and filial communion with Him. 

Let men, if they choose, deem it impossible, or 
deride it as fanatical ; — yet, as surely as the Bible is 
truth, so certain is it that God enjoins it on man to 
become again the godly, and that without this holi- 



GODLINESS. 165 

ncss no man shall sec the Lord, in the heavenly world. 
The godliness of our text is, then, communion with 
God and conformity to Him ; and that conformity is 
two-fold, and implies not only the imitation of His 
character, but the acceptance of His testimonies ; not 
only zeal for holiness, but zeal for truth. If I come to 
my kingly Father in Heaven, I credit His histories 
and accept His statutes ; as well as copy His imitable 
attributes, and gratefully receive His proffered pardon 
and fellowship. Faith, indeed, as grasping the truths 
of God, is in Scripture made the root of the moral 
graces received from God ; and the holiness or godli- 
ness of Scripture must therefore proceed from faith, 
or assent to God's true statements and edicts. On 
this side, it will be seen, that godliness necessarily is 
allied to and inclusive of evangelical faith. Godliness, 
then, has its three sides. It is communion with God, 
or the society of our Maker is enjoyed in true worship 
of Him. It is intellectual and spiritual assimilation 
to Him, in the cordial admission and love of His 
truth ; and practical assimilation to Him, in the en- 
deavor to reflect on the world, dimly and narrowly in- 
deed, but as we may, the lustre of His graces and 
some broken, distant beams, at least, of his moral ex- 
cellencies. 

To make this possible — to raise the fallen, and re- 
build the down-trodden and polluted shrine, God him- 
self has come amongst us. He has, in the person of 
His Son, assumed human nature, and not only borne 
our sin, but shown us a perfect pattern of our own 
nature, as that nature was in Him uplifted and sane- 



166 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

tified, and made perfect in excellence. Through Christ 
as the Advocate, He invites the communion of prayer, 
alike from the solitary worshipper in the closet and 
on the mountain side, and on the death-bed ; and 
from the assembled family at the social altar ; and from 
the christian congregation gathered on His Sabbaths 
into His sanctuaries. Through the Son He gives to 
us the. blessed and renewing influences of the Spirit, 
changing the unregenerate into a new and holier na- 
ture ; and restoring the regenerate from their daily 
lapses, and preserving the life and growth of their chris- 
tian graces amid all the influences from without, which 
tend to tarnish, and corrupt, and extinguish that holi- 
ness. And as godliness is, as we have already seen, 
three-fold ; Christ, in the influence of His Spirit, re- 
veals Himself in His three-fold office, as the Way, 
through whom we have the required communion, — 
the Truth, in whom we obtain the requisite teach- 
ings, — and the Life, in whom is given us the new 
and better existence that quickens our moral death, 
and makes x us alive unto Grod, and conformed to Him. 
Hence, when the apostle John, who had leaned on 
Christ's bosom, describes the divine life of godliness, 
he sums it up in the knowledge of Christ. " We are 
in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. 
This is the True God and eternal life."* 

Such is godliness — communion with our Grod, con- 
formity in Practical Obedience, and conformity in 
Spiritual Character and Intellectual Belief to Grod ; 
and all these freely and only attainable in the knowl- 

* 1 John, v. 20. 



GODLINESS. 167 

edge of one Christ, — the one Bringer and exhaustless 
Fountain of all grace. Bat when, at the close of his 
first epistle, the beloved disciple thus grouped all the 
constituent principles of godliness around the knowl- 
edge of Jesus, we see that he followed it by the 
significant words, which afterwards succeed, and which 
close the epistle: "Little children, keep yourselves 
from idols." 

-II. There are foul semblances of godliness, mere 
idols , that delude many. Let us keep ourselves from 
them. True godliness is not what some regard it. 
It is not fantastic and unscriptural revery, for it grasps 
and conforms to (rod's revealed truth : and one and 
the same Spirit, working in the renewed heart, coalesces 
with its own utterances, preserved on the inspired 
pages. It is not mere outward ceremonies, and cum- 
brous rituals. It is a life of assimilation to (rod. It 
is not mere remote and terrified homage, as of a 
bondsman, crouched at a great distance from the 
dread and tremendous throne. It is communion, by 
" a new and living way," that enters the most holy 
place, rends the veil of parting, and lifts us from the 
prison-house into the family and arms of Grod as of a 
reconciled and adopting Father. 

1. It is a mistake, then, to suppose, that mere 
veneration for some higher existence, however imagi- 
nary and false our views of this existence, — that such 
vague veneration is godliness ; that Grod hears, alike 
with delight, those who call him Jehovah and receive 
the Bible, and those who call him Juggernaut and 
who swear by the Hindoo Shaster. Baal's priests, 



168 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

lacerated and slain by the Lord's Elijah, were godly, if 
such veneration for a higher object were enough to 
constitute godliness ; and the mothers who flung of old 
their babes into the fiery arms of Moloch, or who beside 
the streams of India or the sea-shore of Western Africa 
have cast, on this blessed Sabbath, their children to 
the crocodile or the shark, were godly ; if mere awe 
before an imaginary G-od of their own devising be 
enough to constitute it. Then, the votary of Tibet, 
whirling his written prayers around on a wheel, whose 
every revolution counts in his view for a renewal of 
the petition, is a devout man and accepted of G-od. 
According to this theory, the daughter of Pharaoh who 
became the queen of Solomon, was alike, a true, and 
accepted worshipper, when adoring the garlic or the 
viper in her native Egypt, as when afterwards she had 
been taught to bow on Jehovah's own chosen mount, 
within his own shrine. 

In this vague and unscriptural sense of the term, 
the Atheistic poet, Shelley, and the Pantheistic philoso- 
pher, Spinoza, have been called men of piety, .because 
of a spirit of tenderness and awe that was attributed 
to them. But Atheism, — the ungrateful and irrational 
dethronement and denial of any G-od,— -is that, to be 
by any apothecary's art of liberalism made to coalesce 
with the love and worship of the true God, as forming 
the same incense of accepted adoration ? As to Pan- 
theism, it is opposed to piety or true godliness, radically 
and throughout. True godliness begins in humility 
and penitence, and is sustained by prayer and adora- 
tion. But Pantheism begins in Pride. It makes us 



GODLINESS. 169 

ourselves part and parcel of God. It abjures prayer, 
for there is no being to need, and none to hear, it. It 
cannot worship, for all is alike worthy of receiving 
worship, from the ashes on which Job sate to the God 
whom his wife bade him curse. It is the most 
impious and ungodly of all systems, for it makes God 
the author and doer of all sin, and thus annihilates the 
eternal distinctions of Right and Wrong. Confounding 
the Omnipresence and Agency of God together, it 
makes creatures, unorganized and organized, brute and 
human, angelic and fiendish, all but efflorescences and 
parts of the Almighty ; and all action whatever, from 
Abel's offering of sacrifice to Cain's lifting the fratrici- 
dal arm, were alike God moving himself, and honoring 
or murdering Himself. The damsel with the spirit of 
divination, and the apostle who ejected the demon within 
her, were, on this scheme, alike inspired. It annihilates 
Conscience, and Responsibility, and Individuality, Re- 
pentance, and Temperance, and Patience, and flings 
around man the sinner, when most sinning, the immuni- 
ties and honors and rights of Divinity. It is an awful 
proof of the deep and damning hatred of the unrenewed 
heart to Truth and God, that in christian Europe and 
America after the blaze for nineteen centuries which has 
illuminated them from the heights of Calvary, the doc- 
trine that Braminism, with its priestly despotism, its 
foul impurity, and its most degrading idolatry, has 
been teaching for more than twenty centuries in India, 
should be transporting itself into the lands long blessed 
with the light of the Cross, there to be hailed as a 
higher philosophy and a deeper piety. It is as if 

8 



170 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

Satan, desperate and maddened with, the w6%nds of 
missionary zeal on his ancient empire in the East, 
were determined to revive in the universities of Europe 
and America what had become too offensive and 
ridiculous to find longer universal credence among the 
besotted Hindoos, or the dozing Sufis of Persia. And 
upon the young in their indiscriminate admiration of 
writers, British or American, who have caught from 
German philosophy more or less of this foul taint, 
it may have a fatal influence. To credit it, in the face 
of its moral fruits as India shows them, and in com- 
parison with the gospel and Saviour whom it would 
banish from amongst us, is as if the Hebrews had 
turned from the mightier miracles and the heavenly 
attestations of Moses their emancipator, to the juggleries 
of their old taskmasters, Jannes and Jambres, the 
magicians of the land where their fathers had long 
witnessed only oppression and woe, — the land, whose 
gods the God of their fathers had humbled and foiled, 
amid their own proudest monuments, and in their own 
most sacred shrines. 

2. It is a mistake, again, to look, as some seem now 
disposed to do, upon the austerities and ceremonies of a 
superstitious and apostate church, the Churchpf Rome, 
as the fairest exhibition of godliness. True piety 
has been found there of old, and may yet be found in 
many of the adherents of that anti-christian commu- 
nion. But the artistic piety of some, — who would make 
a sentimental admiration of the ancient and imposing, 
in music, and art, and architecture, to be identical 
with religious feeling, — will not be found to meet 



GODLINESS. 171 

long the exigencies of life, and the arts of the tempter ; 
nor does it at all consider the claims of the Scriptures 
respecting true and acceptable devotion. Traditions 
for (rod's truths ; — external ceremonies, for an inward 
and spiritual experience ; — penance for penitence ; — 
human merits, instead of Christ the Lord our Righte- 
ousness ; — and sacraments, as the vehicle, made a suf- 
ficient substitute for, or infallible warrant of, the Di- 
vine Spirit ; — present a series of substitutions, against 
which the word of Grod has already warned us, and 
most significantly protested. 

3. Yet another school to be found in that church, 
but with tendencies quite opposite to those of the class 
just described, are the Mystics. They are not met 
exclusively in the Roman communion. There have 
been among them men eminently spiritual and of 
deep piety. But the system, as such, is dangerous 
and unscriptural. It teaches men to judge falsely both 
of sin and of grace. Of sin, it takes false and inade- 
quate views, representing it to consist too much in the 
existence and action of the passions, as if the extir- 
pation or quiescence of these were true virtue ; and 
confounding self-love with selfishness, it teaches a sort 
of abnegation which Revelation has not required, and 
which our Creator has not made possible. Of grace, 
it teaches us to expect the bestowal, rather in quiet 
contemplation than in the active study and meditation 
of Grod's truth, and in energetic obedience to Grod's 
commands. And its chiefest sin is, that it often ob- 
scures the cross of Christ, by turning the eyes of the 
man who would attain godliness to his own spirit and 



172 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

God's Spirit, first, rather than to the Atonement, and 
Righteousness, and Advocacy of Christ as the price 
and channel of the Spirit's influences. In the writings of 
Fenelon, and Madame Guion, excellent as the saintly 
authors were, may, we think, be found traces of these 
false views as to what godliness is, and as to the mode 
in which it is to be obtained and cherished. True re- 
ligion is spiritual, and true worship is eminently, as 
an old scholar described it, " the flight of one alone to 
the Only One ;" — the soul in its loneliness betaking 
itself, apart from its fellows, to God, as the one and 
the sufficing Refuge. But that Refuge, Christ is, 
and God only as seen in Christ. He is the way along 
which that flight must travel, and none cometh to the 
Father but by Him, the Son. The true Spirit wit- 
nesses of Him. In some offshoots of the Quietist and 
Mystic school, the Holy Spirit has also Jost his honors, 
as well as the Saviour, being confounded with the 
unaided reason of man. . 

III. In what mode, then, may we safely and sue- 
cessfully attain the godliness, which the apostle here 
enjoins ? Far, then, as it is a life, God must give it. 
Far as it is a truth, He in his Scriptures, and by the 
Spirit of His Son, must teach ; it and far as it is a 
communion, it must be sought in the one way, Christ, 

" — the king's highway of holiness," 

as the good Cennick, the coadjutor first of Whitfield, 
and afterwards the . convert of Moravianism, in* his 
hymn describes it. To be godly we must be with 
God, and he is approached through Christ and by 



GODLINESS. 173 

prayer. Daily, and earnest, and effectual supplication 
is necessary. This must, again, seek God's teachings 
in the study of His revealed Truth. Here he has mani- 
fested Himself, his purposes, and character ; and this, 
his book, he delights to honor, and to transcribe afresh 
into the experience and hearts of his devout people. 
Hidden in the heart, it becomes guidance, and impulse, 
and gladness, along our intricate and varied pathway. 
But the volume teaches us, as another help to seek the 
society of (rod's people, that we may be profited by 
their vigilance, and sympathy, and experience. In the 
sanctuary, and in other and occasional interviews, the 
friendship and converse of these, " the excellent of the 
earth," minister to the truly devout, some of his richest 
enjoyments. Yet even their society and counsel can- 
not replace the visits of his solitary spirit to the mercy- 
seat of His Father ; nor the visits of the Comforter, 
the Holy Spirit, the Messenger of the Father and the 
Son, to his waiting soul. Thus maintaining a double 
communion with (rod on high, and with the people 
and with the book of Grod here below, the disciple 
walks, what is to the world, a hidden path ; and the 
root of his principles is continually enriched with the 
river that maketh glad the city of Grod. The fruits 
are visible. The life that produces them is invisible 
and divine, hidden with Christ, in Grod. 

But, in addition to the society of Grod's saints, yet 
remaining and warring on the earth, a man, in their 
writings, and in the memorials of them preserved in 
religious biography, may maintain a delightful and 
edifying association with those who have gone before 



174 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

him. The heart of David, and of Paul, yet sends a 
glow and pulse to his heart, in these remote times, 
from the pages that preserve their experience. He 
takes counsel with Augustine and Bunyan, as they 
magnify in their " Confessions" the riches of G-od's for- 
bearance toward them, and as they tell of the great 
waters and fearful pits, out of which the " Grace 
Abounding" of their Father and Grod lifted them. 
The diary of Brainerd, and Martyn, and Pearce, and 
Carey, and Payson, and Judson, — each, is profitable to 
him, and out of their scattered urns, they being dead, 
like Abel, yet speak. The cloud of witnesses, like a 
belt of light, girdling and kindling all the heavens, all 
points in one direction. Of various countries, and 
ages, and communions, they were one in Christ, — one 
in their distrust of self, and love of prayer, and study 
of Scripture — one in spirit, and soon to be gathered 
home, one in abode and inheritance forever. It is de- 
lightful to keep up, in this manner, the communion 
of saints with the departed, and to catch in it a pledge 
and image of that communion, as it shall be extended, 
purified, and made perpetual, in the world of light. 
And it is as profitable, when used in subserviency to 
the study of Scripture, and with prayer for the Spirit 
— it is as profitable as it is delightful. The companion 
of the wise becomes, himself, wise. We catch the 
sweet contagion of their piety. True godliness, then, 
it will be seen, requires, at least, that a certain por- 
tion of our time be spent in solitude. Even religious 
occupation may usurp on the right of the closet. We 
may forget, in the care of the vineyard of others, the 



GODLINESS. 



175 



due tillage of our own fields. • But, to be happy, to be 
long or widely useful, to foil the tempter, and to grow 
in grace, hours must be given to solitary meditation, 
and to individual and secret prayer. 

IY. And now, having seen what godliness is ; having 
dwelt on some of the delusions that are made to stand 
for it ; and on the manner of its attainment and cul- 
ture, in its reality ; is it needed, that w T e further urge 
ourselves, earnestly and incessantly, to seek it ? 

Every inducement of interest and duty, of honor 
and safety, of benevolence to man and piety towards 
Grod, requires each of us to become the friend and 
child and follower of the living (rod. 

1. Remember that it is the highest style of human 
nature. .The scholar, the sage, the discoverer, and the 
hero, what are they, before God, to the saint ? He is 
the hero of the world's noblest conflict, and the dis- 
coverer and colonist of the better country than all 
those lands which Earth washes with all her seas, or 
girdles beneath her brightest skies. Already the charge 
of angels, he is, one day, to be for evermore their com- 
panion and fellow-heir. Look in on Bunyan in the 
dungeon. It is, perhaps, an hour of solitude and sad- 
ness. He sees, through the grating, the quivering leaf, 
and the green hedge. They are free to breathe the 
unfettered air, and to bask beneath the open sky. He 
is shut up. He sees the herds roaming at their will 
unconfined, and hears the call of the bird as it soars 
and sings, and sees perhaps some godless sportsman 
whom he knows, amongst his scorners and persecutors, 
merry and unquestioned, on his way afield. Equipages 



176 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

roll past. Rank and Beauty and Wealth and Learn- 
ing adorn their tenants. Does he envy the quivering 
leaf, and the air-swept hedge, and the uncaged lark, 
or begrudge the hunter his sports, or the rich, and gay, 
and wise, their enjoyment of life ? They have the 
goods of earth. Some have vegetable life, and the 
others animal life, and the others intellectual life, but 
he has spiritual life. In his dungeon he is the Lord's 
freeman. In his oppression, and penury, and lowly 
ignorance, he is visited, and taught, and comforted of 
God. And in that lonely prisoner, tagging his laces, 
or thumbing the martyr's sad, glad story, or bowed 
over his Bible, you have seen the happiest, greatest, 
wisest, and safest man of them all. What made him 
such? His holiness. 

2. Holiness is, again, the master-key of the universe. 
Born to die, you are fated to travel hence. You are 
but a sojourner here, as all your fathers, before you, 
were. Earth is not your home. The summons of 
death comes, and you must go forth. But whither ? 
Become God's charge and child. Be a renewed man 
by God's grace ; and you are gifted, virtually, with 
the freedom of the Universe. In traversing our lit- 
tle narrow earth, there is much gained for the con- 
venience and ease of the pilgrim, when he has a 
circulating letter of credit that will secure him funds 
at any great town which he visits ; and when, by his 
knowledge of the language, he can converse with the 
natives of all the lands that he may enter. He has 
thus a sort of universal pass-key, alike to resources 
and to intercourse. He is everywhere at home. But 



GODLINESS. 177 

did you ever 'reflect, that, whilst the knowledge of the 
schools may be comparatively useless after death, and 
the lore of this world become but an unavailable 
burden to the disembodied spirit, — the knowledge, and 
love, and likeness of your Grod furnish a portable 
wealth, which Death only makes more valuable? Did 
you never remember that sympathy with Jehovah is 
the language of the spirit — a celestial dialect, intelligi- 
ble to all holy intelligences in all worlds ? (to where 
you may, — be your journey far into the azure depths 
of space, till our poor planet becomes but a dim 
spangle on the outermost hem of the robe of Night, you 
are, if truly godly, nowhere a stranger, for everywhere 
your Father's sceptre is over you, and your Father's 
grateful and loving subjects encounter you. Schemers 
have toiled to invent a universal character, that all 
people of the earth might use in common. Let there 
be graved on your soul, regenerate and sanctified, the 
characters of true holiness, and of Divine sonship ; — 
and they are recognized by all the hierarchies of 
heaven ; and angels and principalities and powers 
welcome and cherish, in you, a fellow-heir and a 
younger brother of their Sovereign and your Redeemer. 
Soon the hand of the Destroyer will have torn you 
from earthly home, and kindred, and friends. But if 
you are the godly, it is the exchange of a perishable, 
for an imperishable abode ; of a family, small, and 
erring, and mortal, and soon to be scattered, for the 
general assembly and church of the First-born, a count- 
less host, and" all immortal, and impeccable, and indi- 
visible. In that great gathering, think you the swarth 

8* 



178 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS." 

Karen, whom Christ's gospel found in the jungle, will 
be at any loss, because of the difference of their earthly 
dialects, to greet and hold fraternal intercourse with 
the American back- woodsman, who knowing but our 
language, and that but uncouthly, sent by the mis- 
sionary his sympathies and alms to this the missionary 
convert ? Think you, the Sandwich Islander, renewed, 
sanctified and glorified, will be at a loss to address him 
who was, once, his unknown patron and brother on 
these western shores ? No. Their prayers, long since 
though it was, that they were offered, — this, in Karen, 
and this, in Hawaiian, and that, in English, — blended 
in the ear of their common Lord, and returned to earth 
in mutual and intermingling blessings. Shall not, 
think you, their love and likeness to that same Lord, — 
a Lord now near, and now visible, — make them capa- 
ble of full sympathy and of freest intercourse ? 

3. Remember, again, that it is the one thing need- 
ful. Send bread to the famishing, — give sympathy 
to the oppressed, struggling towards the dawn of free- 
dom, as its first faint gleam enters their prison-bars, — 
give healing remedies to those who are sick, and ready 
to die, — give education to the ignorant. — But, before 
the school, or political emancipation, or health, or even 
bread, the tribes of Adam need true godliness. They 
need the termination of that estrangement from their 
Maker, in which began their misery and their sin. 
They need the restoration of that holy image, lost in 
the Fall, and recoverable only in the Redemption and 
the Regeneration. It is your duty to aid in its dis- 
semination, by being more godly, if you are already 



GODLINESS. 179 

converted ; and, by becoming the servant and child of 
Jehovah, if you have remained till this hour ungodly. 
If you neglect this duty much longer, the one season 
of opportunity may close forever, as suddenly, as irre- 
vocably. If you continue till death thus neglectfui, 
your children, however tenderly nurtured and richly 
dowered, — your neighbors, however kindly treated- 
and however much admiring you, — your friends, the 
most intimate, and the most attached, — dying impeni- 
tent, and confirmed in their irreligion by your baleful 
example, will accuse your sin in the day of judgment ; 
and God will not hold you guiltless of their perdition, 
as well as your own. Sabbaths, for what did they 
shine ? The Bible, why did it come to you ? Apos- 
tles and prophets, and Christ himself, why did they 
come, and witness, and toil, and die ? That you 
should be still, stubbornly, and to the last, an ungodly 
man ? Perhaps, for you, tears and prayers have been 
offered. The dead have interceded for you. Remem- 
ber, if death and the judgment-day finds you God's 
enemy, eternal separation will be between you and 
these, your pious friends ; and the godly mother herself, 
who bare you, will cling to her Saviour, and abjure, 
then, the godless son who scorned that Saviour, too 
long, and to the last. 

4. The last consideration is, that, as godliness is the 
bond and croivn of all the virtues, so it is, on the 
other hand, the one and sufficient remedy for the sub- 
jugation and removal of all the vices. Other reforms 
are of limited application. This is the only radical 
reform, whose effects branch out over all God's uni- 



180 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

verse. Other remedies are but specific, for single 
maladies. This conversion to (rod, — the grace of Grod 
in the gift of his dear Son, — is a catholicon that has 
healed, and can again heal, to the world's end, de- 
pravity the most foul and obdurate. u The blood of 
Christ cleanseth from all sin." 

Look at the foul, seething caldron of Roman society, 
in Paul's times. Think of a Tiberius and Caligula 
and Nero, on the throne of absolute sovereignty, giving 
tone to all that vast empire. See what inveterate 
profligacy, and loathsome corruption, made the eternal 
city, as a very witches' caldron of all detestable and 
unnatural things. What drug of your moral me- 
dicaments, — what power in your philosophy, — what 
strange energy of your civilization, could reach, and 
cure, and renew such iniquity ? What gods they 
have chosen; and how have they become like the 
objects of their idolatry ! With Mercury the thief; — 
Apollo, the god of music, flaying in jealous revenge an 
unsuccessful rival in art ; — Jupiter the profligate, and 
Saturn the cannibal ; — and Venus the harlot, — all in 
their shrines, what must be — what were, the worship- 
pers ? But Christ's gospel is cast into that simmering 
mass, and even, oat of that horrible abyss, come forth 
renewed, and pure, and upright, and true men. G-od 
is in the gospel, and its fruits are the godliness that is 
profitable to the life that now is, and that hath promise 
also of the life to come. The decree and provision of 
God, for the relief of earth's wickedness and woe, it 
must go forth " conquering and to conquer," and bear- 
ing down, before it, all opposition. For you, the only 



GODLINESS. 181 

question is, whether you, in ungrateful and unavailing 
strife against it, shall be crushed beneath its victorious 
and irresistible wheels; or whether, for your own 
sake, and the sake of your race, and the sake of your 
Grod, you consent to accept, and share and speed 
onward its fated and universal triumph. God make 
yours the just decision ; and grant it be speedy, as 
well as just. 



LECTURE VIII. 

BROTHERLY KINDNESS. 

" and to godliness, BROTHERLY KINDNESS." 

2 Peter, i. 7. 

This same apostle has, in his earlier epistle, # en- 
joined it upon the disciples of Christ to "love the 
brotherhood." And whom has the Saviour taught us 
to regard as being thus our kindred and our brethren, 
to be cherished with every feeling of fraternal tender- 
ness, and to receive from us every office of " brotherly 
kindness ?" We turn to the gospels, for the needful 
light in interpreting the epistles. 

When our Lord was celebrating with his apostles 
the dread, and yet the much-desired, Passover, the 
last religious ordinance of his life on earth, he said to 
them, whilst the imminence of a fearful peril, and the 
nearness of his own departure, would make every sen- 
tence that fell from his lips, weighty and memorable 
with that mourning band: "A new commandment \ 
give unto you, That ye love one another : as I have 
loved you that ye also love one another. By this shall 
all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love 
one to another."! Were he less than a Grod, would it 

* 1 Peter, ii. 17. f John, xiii. 34, 35. 



BROTHERLY KINDNESS. 183 

be fitting for him, as he looked off into the eternity he 
was so soon to enter, to talk of giving commandments, 
and new commandments ? We answer, it was the 
same Legislator that had spoken amid the fiery tem- 
pest, and clad in all the terrors of the Lord on Sinai, 
that was speaking now, as he was soon to endure on 
Calvary the terrors he had but dispensed on Sinai. Tt 
was a new commandment, because the precept was 
new in its scope. Glancing over the barriers of tribe, 
and land, and century, it embraced the believers of all 
races and countries and dispensations, overriding all 
the distinctions on which men lay such stress, of rank, 
and office, and wealth, and culture and hue, and lin- 
eage, and sect. Far as men loved Him, they were to 
be loved by all # that were His. There was to be 
neither Jew nor Gentile, Greek nor Barbarian, bond 
nor free, in their common Redeemer and Sovereign. 

It was new in its authorship. The Decalogue on 
Sinai had been given indeed by this same legislator, 
but it was mediately, and through his servant Moses, 
Thrusting aside all intervention, He, the Son, himself, 
seeing whom men saw the Father also, was now come 
to speak, face to face, and as with open vision, that 
law of Love, which crowned and solved all the earlier 
commandments. The new and better dispensation he 
brought in, as it rested, with regard to its heavenly 
relations, on better promises, than the old, so it pro- 
claimed, as to men's earthly relations and duties, a 
nobler and better commandment. " Love is the ful- 
filling of the law," and he whp loveth, " worketh no ill 
to his neighbor." He who, in Christ's spirit, loves his 



184 



RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 



neighbor, has the Decalogue, in compend and essence, 
already transcribed on his heart. It was, again, novel 
in its motives. To intimate his full and equal Deity, 
the Son here makes Love to himself, the motive of holy 
obedience. Were His services and His love to us less 
than those of a Grod, would such motive be aught else 
than insufficient for man and derogatory to our Father 
in Heaven ? And it was new, too, in its evidence. It 
would become, before the world, the badge and public 
pledge of christian discipleship. And of the early 
Christians, it is said, that the heathen were wont to 
exclaim, " See how these Christians love one another." 
Is there not here at least, something to be lamented 
and to be amended, in regard to the fraternal sympa- 
thies of the churches of modern times ? Have not 
meaner and baser distinctions become the chief evi- 
dence and proclamation to the world of our christian 
discipleship ? All who love the Lord Jesus Christ in 
sincerity ought to come, evidently and of right, within 
the brotherhood of whom the apostle here speaks. 

2. But whilst I am required to cherish and display 
a brother's warm and ready regard for these, are none 
but these my brethren ? We answer to this question : 
The law of christian fraternity, as promulgated in 
Christ's new commandment, was intended to override, 
but not to obliterate and annul the law of an earlier 
and inferior brotherhood. If I am to be the kinsman, 
by spiritual allegiance to a common Saviour, of all 
who hold Him as their head, I do not therefore 
forego or escape the law of my natural kinsmanship 
to those whom Grod has made my brethren in blood. 



BROTHERLY KINDNESS. 185 

Our Lord himself taught the higher and paramount 
obligation of the spiritual and celestial brotherhood, 
when his mother and brethren, by natural ties, would 
have hindered his ministry, and imputed to Him, the 
Divine and Infallible, delusion and madness. In com- 
parison with them, he called rather those his mother 
and his brethren who heard and obeyed his teachings. 
But, still, he did not abjure utterly the ties of earthly 
kindred ; and, when hanging on the Cross, with the 
weight of a world's iniquities crushing his soul, he had 
the eye and heart of a son for his human parent, and 
bequeathed the bereaved mother to the care and home 
of his best beloved disciple. Spiritual ties, whilst 
overriding, then, do not annul and efface all natural 
bonds. And who are our brethren, by these earlier 
and human ties ? We suppose all who are near to us 
— those attached and grappled to us by the domestic 
charities, our kindred in blood, and those connected 
by the ties of affinity as well as those of consanguin- 
ity ; — those, again, with whom we are united of our 
free choice by the bonds of friendship ; and those, 
lastly, who are our countrymen, one with us by the 
law of patriotism. When David lamented the fall of 
Jonathan, his friend, who had found, on the high 
places of the field, an untimely but glorious death, he 
cried, " I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan 
— very pleasant hast thou been unto me."* We sup- 
pose that it was not from the ties of affinity, as the hus- 
band of Michal, the sister of Jonathan, so much as from 
their close and endeared friendship, that the Psalmist 

* 2 Sam. i. 26. 



186 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

held the son of Saul as being thus his " brother." And 
our Lord himself, in whom no human affection had its 
error of excess, or error of defect, cherished for one of 
his apostles a special friendship, and by committing to 
him as a son, the charge of the mother whose heart 
had been deeply pierced as well as richly blest, he did 
treat this his friend, as a brother, in another sense 
from that in which the other apostles, and all Chris- 
tians, are in common his brethren. As to the relation- 
ship of blood and common descent, the grace and the 
gospel of Jesus did not extinguish these ties and 
claims. The gospel speaks of the sons of Christ's 
mother, or of Joseph his reputed father, as being his 
brethren, when as yet they did not believe on him ; 
and the Lord pronounced a promise and blessing on 
those who had forsaken children or brethren for his 
name's sake, as he uttered also a warning that in the 
times of persecution yet to burst upon the infant 
church, brother would, from hatred to Jesus, give up 
brother to death. Again, in that family of Bethany, 
all whose members were believers, and were loved by 
Christ, he spoke still of natural, rather than of spirit- 
ual kindred, when he said to Martha, one of those sis- 
ters, " Thy brother shall rise again." And when the 
apostles are enumerated, the ties of natural brother- 
hood that bound James to John, and Peter to Andrew, 
are recognized in the titles given to them, and in the 
order in which the Holy GHiost arranges the roll of 
Christ's apostle family. 

But, beside this recognition of fraternity as consti- 
tuted by domestic ties, and by the voluntary and self- 



BROTHERLY KINDNESS. 187 

assumed bonds of friendship and sympathy, the New 
Testament recognized in the impenitent Jews, the 
brethren of the apostles, because these Jews were 
their countrymen. Under the Old Testament dispen- 
sation, this style of appellation had been used. When 
Moses rebuked and would have parted the two He- 
brews whom he saw contending in Egypt, he said, " Ye 
are brethren ;" and he forbade one Israelite from tak- 
ing usury of another because of this fraternal rela- 
tion. " Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury, 
but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury."*' 
And, after the descent of the Spirit on the day of Pen- 
tecost, we find Peter and Stephen addressing the 
hardened haters and murderers of Christ, as " Men 
and brethren," because they were of their country and 
lineage. Paul used the same form of speech to the 
Jews, yet impenitent, when addressing them in the 
synagogue of Antioch in Pisidia ; f — when thrust upon 
the stairs, before the riotous crowd who howled for his 
blood in the courts of the temple ; t — when pleading 
before the council of bigoted and unbelieving Phari- 
sees and Sadducees, in that same Jerusalem ; § — and 
when he addressed the chief of the Jews, whom he 
convened in his hired house on reaching: Home. II To 
others, not his countrymen, if they were not believers 
in Christ, he seems to have sedulously avoided the use 
of this fraternal appellation ; and hence amid the 
shrines and statues of Athens, he opens his address 
with the words, " Men of Athens," IT whilst, in urging 

* Deuter. xxiii. 20. f Acts, xiii. 26. \ Ibid. xxii. 1. 

§ Acts, xxiii. 1. | Ibid, xxviii. 17. f Ibid. xvii. 22. 



188 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

his Gentile fellow- voyagers to cast off their despair, 
and partake of necessary food, he calls them " Sirs."* 

The law of Christian and spiritual brotherhood, 
whilst it does override, then, and justly should, the 
law of earlier, and earthly, and inferior brotherhood, 
or the ties of nature, does by no means, as some sup- 
pose, efface those ties. It did not in Christ's own 
practice, or in that of his apostles. The friend, the 
kinsman, and the countryman, were still, in this sense, 
and apart from religious sympathies, Xi brethren :" 
though the word was the more frequently employed in 
the New Testament to describe the bonds of mutual 
attachment, of a common duty, and a common hope, 
and a common Lord and a common home on high, that 
made all disciples one family in Christ, and one house- 
hold of faith. But, just as in the law of marriage, the 
husband, though forsaking his father or mother to 
cling yet more nearly to his wife, does not thereby 
lose, from this controlling relation, the heart or the 
ties, the feelings or the duties, of a child to that father 
or mother : so in the new and spiritual bonds which 
attachment to Christ brings upon His people, — the ce- 
lestial obligation superinduced upon the earthly rela- 
tion, — they cease not to keep and to owe all rightful 
allegiance to friendship, and the family, and the 
country. 

We have thus seen, then, as the first branch of our 
subject, who are our brethren. — Spiritually, all are 
such who love Christ : naturally, we recognize as 
such, kindred, friends, and countrymen. Our rela- 

* Acts, xxvii. 21. 



BROTHERLY KINDNESS. 189 

tions to these two classes are not necessarily conflict- 
ing and adverse. The new convert will be, for his 
piety, all the better, as a son, and parent, and hus- 
band, and friend, and patriot. But these two classes 
of obligation may, by men's hatred to, and persecu- 
tion of the truth, become adverse. In such case, as 
we love our souls, and as Grod is greater than man, 
the ties of our brotherhood to Christ are paramount. 
No man can enter Heaven who does not, in such case, 
and in such sense, hate father and mother, yea, and 
his own life, if it would interpose between his soul 
and obedience to Jesus, his best, truest, and surest of 
friends. 

Let us, imploring the aids of God's good Spirit, now 
consider, 

II. How godliness needs the addition of brotherly 
kindness. 

III. How this christian grace is to operate, in the 
sphere of worldly and natural brotherhood. 

IV. How the same grace of brotherly kindness is to 
affect us, in the sphere of the spiritual and christian 
brotherhood. 

II. How, then, is it that godliness needs the addi- 
tion of brotherly kindness ? The grace of true conse- 
cration to Grod and to His glory requires, we reply, to 
be reinforced and illustrated by the grace of tender- 
ness and fraternal sympathy for man. 

1. Far as the range of worldly brotherhood extends, 
in our relations to the home, to the circles of friend- 
ship, and to our countrymen generally, godliness 
should be guarded by this grace of human sympathy, 



190 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

to counteract an unjust, but common imputation 
against true piety. To some minds godliness seems to 
require the utter contempt and disregard of these 
worldly and natural ties. They read of Abraham, at 
God's call, forsaking his kindred and the place of his 
nativity, Ur of the Chaldees. They see Levi honored, 
because, in the work of avenging the outraged law of 
his Lord, " he knew not father or mother," but with 
even-handed severity cleft down all the idolatrous revel- 
lers, however near to himself they might be by ties of 
kindred. They hear the Saviour refusing permission 
to the disciple, who would return home from his ser- 
vice and errand, to bid farewell to them at his own 
home ; and another, who pleaded a desire to inter his 
deceased friends, is dismissed sternly, with the warn- 
ing : " Let the dead bury their dead." And so should 
we break through such feeble ties, if a like emergency, 
and the same great errand, and the same indubitable 
and sovereign command, come upon us. But, does 
the godly love of Christ involve, in all times, and to 
all persons, such estrangement from ordinary duties, 
and such prompt disruption of all social bonds ? Some 
make the mistake here, which renders the apostle's 
caution in this classification of christian graces, neces- 
sary. Piety is not necessarily unbrotherly and un- 
kind. 

To others, godliness seems to involve a disowning 
of all their old associations and bonds, because they 
see the dominion of error and iniquity in the world 
around, and they believe it the readiest way to disen- 
tangle their own feet, and rid their • own souls of bur- 



BROTHERLY KINDNESS. 191 

dens and perils, by doing, what Paul says they need not, 
and should not do, — they " go out of the world." Duty 
to God may require us not to be of the world, indeed : 
and, yet, duty to Grod and man may quite as distinctly 
require us to be in the world. The monk, fleeing to 
the wilderness, — the spiritualist, overlooking his en- 
gagements to society and the household, in the care 
of the closet and his soul, — are answerable for an 
error here, against which our text, as by anticipation, 
protests most clearly and fully. Their godliness lacks 
brotherly kindness. 

So, too, the hostility of the worldly to true piety, 
venting itself of old by statutes, and penalties, in- 
carceration and martyrdom, and all the forms of vio- 
lent persecution ; — venting itself in our times, rather 
in derision and cruel mockery, and ready falsehood, 
may easily provoke in the minds of the truly godly, a 
strangeness and an alienation that would, unchecked, 
issue in utter isolation. But, this is rather natural than 
justifiable. It is not so much the strength of the Chris- 
tian's godliness, as the human weakness intermingled 
with, and diluting that piety, which thus teaches him to 
withdraw, because he has cause of complaint. When 
a man's enemies are thus in his own household ; or 
when the literature of a country travesties and belies 
the truly pious, as Hudibras travestied the Puritans, 
or, as the buffoonery of Foote belied the early Meth- 
odists, it is easy for the man to yield to the temptation 
of abjuring the ungodly, who so wrong and misrepre- 
sent him. "When the Psalmist became, as he said, 
" the drunkard's song" .he might be easily moved 



192 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

to shun all acquaintance with the reveller, and to re- 
nounce even poetry and music, because they had been, 
in the godless ballad, so prostituted and desecrated. 

Again, even when the righteous man feels no such 
spirit of retaliation for cruel mockery and foul slan- 
ders, the worldly, hating where they injure, stand 
aloof from their victim, and then impute to him the 
isolation, which is not the result of his choice, but 
their own. Thus, Joseph Milner, the pious historian 
of the church, in the early days of his ministry, when 
Methodism was yet a word of terror and horror to 
multitudes, speaks of a long season in his own pasto- 
ral relations in the English Established Church, in 
Hull, the very place where, afterwards, he was so 
honored, when of his townsmen " no man wearing a 
good coat would recognize him in the street." And a 
similar shyness and absence of all friendly greetings, 
marked the earlier ministry of Charles Simeon, in that 
University of Cambridge, where afterwards he was so 
crowned with favor and honor of Grod, and of man 
also. 

2. But not only may the bonds of worldly and 
human brotherhood, thus, with or without the Chris- 
tian's fault, be seemingly sundered by his godliness ; 
a man's piety may seem to hinder his recognition at 
times of the ties of spiritual brotherhood also. If it be 
asked, how this can be, let it be remembered in reply, 
that a man of eminent devoutness may easily become 
absorbed and abstracted in manner. It was a matter 
of complaint, against one of the most eminent Chris- 
tians of our own country, whose life was as eminent 



BROTHERLY LOVE. 193 

for pastoral fidelity, as was his death-bed for its tri- 
umphant raptures, that his brethren found him at 
times unsocial. The ordinary associates of Calvin 
thought him, some of them, not duly afflicted and sym- 
pathizing, when his only child sunk in early infancy to 
the grave. And as to the early Christians, we find 
the Roman historian charging them with " hatred of 
the human race," probably on the mere ground of their 
conscientious abstinence from the amusements and 
associations around them, — all contaminated and con- 
taminating as these were, by the sedulous infusion of 
idolatry into them. Their piety made them, to a 
careless observer, seem shy and sad and misanthropic. 
And, in our more peaceful times, goodness may be- 
come so ethereal as to be comparatively unearthly. 
Like the bewildered disciples on the Mountain of 
Transfiguration, the rapt worshippers of God may 
scarce know what they are saying or doing, as they 
return to less solemn and less glorious scenes. 

3. But a more disastrous barrier to this brotherly 
kindness, is the existence and rage of controversy 
among Christians. It is well that they should love 
the truth, and all the truth, for it is a deposit from 
Grod, which they may not relinquish, or hide, or 
divide and modify. Truth, too, is the very support of 
holiness, and must become the ultimate platform and 
basis of a common union. Yet their zeal may not be 
godly, and with imperfect sanctification, and imperfect 
enlightenment, they may hold the truth dispropor- 
tionately, and defend it unworthily, and with unchris- 
tian fierceness or levity, or even unfairness and evasion. 

9 



4.94 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

Thus divided and jarring, it is hard even for an Owen 
and a Baxter, eminent as each was for godliness, to do 
full kindness and justice to his dissentient brother in 
Christ ; and Wesley and Toplady, and Fletcher and 
Hill, in later times, would each find, in their zeal for 
the truth as they held it, excuse for disliking or de- 
nouncing a true brother whose views of that truth 
were not their views. 

4. But especially has the acceptance by Christians, 
from the state, of the snare and fetter of worldly 
endowment, and of legislation for the Christian Church, 
made it difficult for the godly to be also the brotherly. 
Treating the Church, so fettered, as a tool, rather than 
as a queen, statesmen have corrupted her discipline, 
and doctrine, and morality ; and whilst the pious have 
been found adhering to her, others equally or more 
pious have been amerced and defamed, imprisoned or 
hunted into exile, or chased through martyr-fires from 
earth to Heaven. Hard has it been for the true breth- 
ren of Christ, thus within and without the pale of a 
national establishment, to recognize and love each other. 
Yet it has been done. Sir Matthew Hale, in the Estab- 
lished Church, was the friend of Baxter, the persecuted 
Non-conformist, and was kind to the wife of the maligned 
and oppressed Bunyan, another glorious name in Non- 
conformity. But in the days when Scotch Episcopacy 
persecuted the stern Covenanters with fire and sword, 
it was not to be expected that the saintly Leighton, 
even, on the one side, should aright know and love his 
brethren, the martyred Renwick, Cameron, and McCail, 
on the other side. 



BROTHERLY LOVE. 195 

Godliness, in its estrangement from earth, and in 
its controversies, and in the treacherous and crippling 
alliance of the state, may seem to be unfriendly to 
brotherly kindness. And yet without fraternal affec- 
tion to those bearing Christ's likeness, godliness cannot 
be perfect. It needs the brotherhood human and the 
brotherhood divine — the field of the church not only, 
but of the friendly band, of the household, and of the 
country, to develope its powers of good and to display 
its genuineness and celestial loveliness. 

Kindness to our brother man, again, needs for its 
own culture and control, for its perpetual spring and 
exhaustless source, the love and the fear of Almighty 
God. When we love our fellow-man, but for our own 
sake, and for his sake, disappointments weary, and in- 
gratitude worries us ; and we are prone, as death 
removes friends, or change alienates them, to exchange 
sympathy for selfishness, and friendly diligence for 
indolent apathy. The English poet, in lines often 
quoted, compares friendly and benevolent feelings to 
the ripples of a lake stirred by a falling pebble. The 
circle widens and spreads till all the body of water is 
moved and the shore is reached. But in the human 
friendliness that proceeds from earthly and inferior 
motives, who can insure the continuance of sympathy 
in its energy ? Where, we ask, if a man's benevolence 
is only from kindness of temper, or from love of fame, 
or influence, — and change and Death have removed 
the old friends, and age is saddening the spirit and 
chilling the sympathies ; where are you to find fresh 
pebbles to keep up the play and spread of the circling 



198 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

waters ? But Christianity, beginning in the Love of 
God, finds in His nature and love, his everlasting 
tenderness and changeless excellence, in his renewed 
pardons and brightening hopes, as they multiply along 
our pilgrim way, not an occasional excitement, but a 
steady and growing fountain ; — not the falling pebble, 
but the upbursting spring — a Geyser of hope and love 
and zeal, " springing up into everlasting life." And 
when men lose their regard for G-od and godliness, they 
are not likely to preserve long and generally their 
active sympathies for man. The first murderer, when 
he began by doubting God's rights to the claim of a 
bloody sacrifice, soon learned, in renouncing godliness, 
to untwist the bond of fraternal charities that held him 
to the more righteous Abel, and to ask insolently, whilst 
his hands were yet red with the gore of a less innocent 
sacrifice than that which he had refused to his God, 
" Am I my brother's keeper ?" Piety needs human 
kindness, to render it lovely before men, and obedient 
before God ; and human kindliness needs piety as its 
guide and perennial source. 

III. We now reach that division of our subject in 
which we consider how the christian grace of brother- 
ly kindness is to fill up the sphere of worldly brother- 
hood, embracing as that does, friendship, kindred, and 
country. 

1. As to the power of religion to adorn and cement 
friendship, the history of the Church speaks emphati- 
cally. In the generous sympathies of David and Jon- 
athan, when the one renounced a throne, and the other 
trusted and leaned on the heir whom he saw himself 



BROTHERLY LOVE. 197 



called in God's purposes to replace, each seeking to ex- 
cel the other, in tenderness, and truthfulness, and 
magnanimity ; in Luther and Melancthon, bringing 
their combined strength, and prayers, and studies, to 
the helm of the church, in times of fiercest tempest 
and revolution ; in the love that bound Calvin and 
Beza, and in after days, Edwards and Whitfield; and 
in our own times of reviving missionary zeal, in the 
threefold cord not broken, of Fuller, and Carey, and 
Ryland, seen binding the heathenism of India to the 
heart of Christian Britain, — as the prophet attached 
himself to the dead son of the Shunammite, — not to 
imbibe its corruption, but to impart their better life, 
till the dead awoke ; in the friendship of a Simeon and 
a Martyn, and a Corrie, and of others whose names 
time fails to tell ; — is it not seen that Christianity, in- 
stead of annihilating friendship, really ennobles, puri- 
fies, and perpetuates it ? 

In the relations of the family, apostles were patterns 
of brotherly influence, made to aid in the advancement 
of mutual piety ; and the Erskines of Scotland, the 
Wesleys of England, and the Tennents of America af- 
ford similar instances of Grod's taking one of a city and 
two of a family to honor him. In the conjugal and 
parental relations, Scotland owes the order and purity 
of her homes confessedly to the Reformation ; and in 
the households of Philip Henry, the Non-conformist, 
and Edward Payson, the American Congregationalist, 
and of Wilberforce and of Leigh Richmond, the En- 
glish Episcopalians, did not Religion lend and receive 
new lustre, in its influence on the domestic charities ? 



198 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

True, the ties of natural kindred may bind together 
those who have no spiritual affinities or sympathies. 
The devout Edwards was the ancestor of the profligate 
and thrice-hardened Aaron Burr. Divine grace is not 
a hereditament. And, from the want of due religious 
sympathy, the intercourse in this world, of the irre- 
ligious and religious kinsman, may often be, to use 
the metaphor of John Newton, like the discourse of 
strangers gathered under the same pent-house by a 
sudden rain-storm, wanting in cordiality, and intej- 
rupted soon as the stress that commenced it will per- 
mit ; yet many will through eternity bless God for 
the filial, and parental, and fraternal influence of 
christian kindred, that at one time but saddened and 
wearied them, but won them at last to Christ and 
Heaven. 

As to the effects of religion on those who are our 
brethren because our countrymen, the topic of Christi- 
anity in its relations to the nation is too vast and com- 
plicated to be at this time discussed. Without becom- 
ing the pensioners, and so the dependants of the state, 
the churches may leaven the nation with their princi- 
ples of order, and virtue, and benevolence — may edu- 
cate the national conscience, and denounce and stem 
the nation's transgressions. Happy the land girdled 
around by thousands of christian sanctuaries, and 
closets. It is evidently a duty of christian patriotism, 
to urge thoroughly the work of Home Missions, and to 
send the Bible and Sabbath-school and ministry on the 
very crest of the westward waves of emigration. And 
in a country like our own, where not, as in Palestine, 



BROTHERLY LOVE. 199 

a single race are the rightful citizens, but where Prov- 
idence has gathered into a common asylum the men 
of many and discordant races, fusing into one mass 
those lon^ and far dissevered from each other in their 
original homes and in their earliest training, how bless- 
ed may be the influence of that gospel which is for 
all nations, and which teaches them that " of one 
blood" God hath made them all. Receiving as our 
shores have done, the victims of religious persecution, 
the hunted and maligned Puritan, the Huguenot ex- 
patriated from sunny France, the Hollander mindful 
of his country's old woes from the relentless Alva, the 
Baptist and the Quaker fleeing from intolerance in 
Britain, and intolerance yet more inexcusable in New 
England, the Waldensian colonists and the Moravian, 
of some of our Southern States ; and the Saltzburgher 
exiles of Germany, for the sake of religion, driven from 
home and country ; it is to be hoped, that no return to 
mediaeval usages, and no growth of anti-christian error 
can plant here the persecuting principles and hierarchies 
of Europe, or make Dominic, the founder of the Inqui- 
sition, a patron saint amongst these free-born men. 
Of the slavery that afflicts a large portion of our terri- 
tory, let us hope that the gospel will work the quiet 
and universal subversion : whilst against a wild spirit 
of conquest, and lust of territory, and avidity for plun- 
der and military glory, let us trust that christian zeal 
and principle in our citizens, and christian fidelity in 
our pulpits, and christian enterprise in our homes and 
sanctuaries will yet preserve us. 

But if the nation should ever enact the wrons\ and 



200 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

frame iniquity by a law, — if superstition should ever 
become here dominant and persecuting, let us rejoice 
in the hope that the law of Christ will have here, as in 
like scenes it elsewhere has had, its fearless and faith- 
ful confessors, who knowing and fearing God rather 
than man, will see in the pleadings of friendship and 
the claims of home and the laws of the country but 
inferior and subsidiary influences, and dare to spurn 
all or either, when either or all would usurp on the 
claims of Conscience and the God of Conscience. 

For Patriotism, and Friendship, and Home, as they 
have in the gospel their surest support and guard, so 
do they owe to it as a paramount authority, their sub- 
mission. In the histories of ancient martyrdom, we 
see christian women resisting the tears and prayers 
of parental and conjugal tenderness, that they might 
follow Christ and escape idolatry. We are to love our 
brethren by ties of nature much, but we love them 
wisely only as we love God more. 

IY. And, now, have we reached the closing division 
of our theme — 'the manner in which the christian 
grace, which the apostle here enjoins, should be dis- 
played in the distinct sphere of spiritual brotherhood. 

Within the same church, then, the disciples of our 
Saviour need to be more and more given to mutual 
intercession. It is animating, and yet as contrasted 
with our prevalent remissness, humiliating, to read 
how Baxter and his people held days of fasting and 
prayer for each other ; or to turn to the pages which 
describe a christian matron at the South, — the wife 
of Hamsay, and the daughter of Henry Laurens, the 



BROTHERLY LOVE. 201 

President of the Continental Congress, — praying over 
a list of her fellow-members, name by name, and re- 
membering to the best of her knowledge the cares 
and wants of each before the throne of grace. 

Christians in this day need, again, to ponder the 
warnings of James, as to social and terrestrial dis- 
tinctions, unduly dwelt upon in the intercourse of fel- 
low-disciples. The honor given to worldly pomp and 
wealth, and the mere formal and fluent sympathy of 
words without deeds shown to the needy Christian, are 
not obsolete evils. Those of the poor indeed who com- 
plain that they are not made more the companions and 
visitants of the wealthy, may show quite as much, in 
their complaints, a carnal spirit, as does the wealthy 
disciple, who is shy and distant towards. his truly pious 
neighbor because of his poverty. The church is not 
to be made, on one side, a mere stepping-stone to re- 
spectable acquaintance ; nor, on the other side, is the 
condition in worldly wealth or culture, of a fellow- 
disciple, to be made an excuse for shutting against 
him the heart of christian sympathy. There is a 
fault, here, to be lamented and removed. In the 
churches of converts in India, Bishop Wilson and oth- 
ers have labored faithfully in endeavoring to break up 
the law of caste, or of proud, social isolation, to which 
the Hindoo so obstinately clings. He is retaining it 
from his old Braminism ; but we are. inexcusable if we 
graft it, from the code of Fashion, as an unseemly and 
ulcerous interpolation, on the law of Christ's house- 
hold. Fraternity among Christians, again, requires 
that we do not abandon merely to the care of the 

9* 



202 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

State, the poor and dependent of our fellow-disciples. 
They may, in the case of poorer churches, receive the 
aid ; but the churches owe to them something more 
and something better. It is not obedience to chris- 
tian discipleship to dismiss our poorer brother through 
the cold mediation of the collector of the town taxes ; 
and having paid our apportionment, as the civil law 
exacted it, for the support of alms-houses, and having 
secured the receipt of the official tax-gatherer, sup- 
pose ourselves to have done all that the Redeemer 
asked, when he said, " Inasmuch as ye have done it 
unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have 
done it unto me." Christ has higher rights in his 
ransomed and vowed people. The law of brotherly 
kindness, again, extends to offences. As the sanctifi- 
cation of Christians is yet but imperfect, there are in 
Christ's true people remains of Evil. Some of these 
are venial, and it is the office of Christian Charity to 
cover them ; others are grave and deadly, and a true 
kindness will accuse and reprove and discipline them. 
But to avail, it must be done in the spirit of meek- 
ness. Christ never authorized his ministers or his 
churches to anoint the wounds, and the ulcers even, 
of the most unworthy with the corrosive and the poi- 
sonous, in our language and in our temper. Even 
" the sharp rebuke" and stern, which some offences 
may require, and of which in the reprimands and de- 
nunciations of Christ himself we have the example, 
should be kindly in its severe fidelity ; and if there be 
needed at times vehement utterance, yet we must 
cherish purest motives and a benign spirit. 



BROTHERLY LOVE. 203 

But, beyond the precincts of our own church, are 
others of our own denomination, and yet others, not 
of the same sectarian badge and banner with that 
borne by ourselves. Far as they resemble Christ, 
they deserve our love. We should seek their sym- 
pathy and fraternal cooperation, though not by the 
sacrifice of any truth, indeed. There have been en- 
deavors to unite dissentient Christians, but on some 
wrong and ruinous basis ; — the sacrifice of some prin- 
ciple, the holding in abeyance some portion of Scrip- 
ture, or the adoption of some human and imaginary 
basis, instead of Christ's platform, — the truth, — suffi- 
cient, eternal, and one. Such endeavors after union 
have failed, and must fail, and ought to fail. Far as 
Christians, in our times, seek alliance on other and 
safer principles, let us rejoice ; and, when, as yet, 
their plans seem rather a vague wish, than a settled 
scheme, let us rejoice at the desire, where we may not 
be able to subscribe to the method. The church has 
now, beside her pulpits, her religious journals. How 
needful and becoming, that these should be gentle, and 
truthful, and healing, and devout, whilst preserving 
all fearless fidelity. 

But, in other lands Christ has his people, speaking 
other than ours of the earth's many dialects, and 
trained under another ecclesiastical regimen. Shall 
we disown them, or forget them ? No. Let us grap- 
ple heart to heart across intervening seas, and spite of 
discordant shibboleths. Is not Tholuck ours, and 
Neander, though on Grerman shores, and surrounded 
by other usages? "Was not Yinet, and is not yet 



204 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

D'Aubigne in Switzerland, laboring in our cause, if 
only, through them, Christ's truth be vindicated and 
diffused? Yes, — the missionary, and the missionary 
convert ; — the witness for forgotten truths amid old 
formalism ; — the advocate for Christ's grace, as the 
one hope of man, amid the votaries of rituals and 
state-creeds — all — far as they breathe Christ's spirit, 
and do Christ's work, are our brethren and fellow- 
laborers ; and to them, near or remote, we owe our 
sympathies and prayers, which no distance, territorial 
or denominational, can intercept, or defeat. 

The theme is wide. It spreads far as the gospel 
tracks the race, through all climes. It spreads into 
coming times, and the endless world. One with 
Christ, we are one in heart, with the church triumph- 
ant, as well as the church militant, and we rejoice in 
those who have gone before us, as we do, in dim and 
vague prospect, in those who are to come after us. 

How glorious is Christ's philosophy ! And, were it 
but an invention of the schools, how loudly, and 
widely, and long, would it have been extolled, for its 
simplicity and comprehensiveness, its reach of benevo- 
lence, and its power of endurance and achievement. 

It shall endure when philosophers that have scouted 
and blasphemed it, have gone by. It shall reconcile 
the race, and heal all earth's woes and wrongs, by fix- 
ing, first, the eyes and hearts of men on the great 
wrongs of man against his Grod, and on the one great 
Remedy of that wrong in a Grod incarnate, dying and 
atoning for our sins, and giving freely, as the boon 



BROTHERLY KINDNESS. 205 

won by his bitter agonies, the renewing Spirit, and, 
among its sweet influences, brotherly concord here, 
the earnest and the emblem of a firmer concord, in 
the larger brotherhood that shall, hereafter, form the 
family of Heaven 



LECTURE IX. 

CHARITY. 

" AND TO BROTHERLY KINDNESS, CHARITY. 

2 Peter, i. 7. 

The word rendered " charity" -is, in the original, the 
same term which is, in many other parts of the New 
Testament, translated " love." It is here placed as the 
key-stone in the arch of the christian graces, at the 
same time crowning, towering over, and binding to- 
gether all the rest. 

But its honors are often usurped by other and 
meaner, and even by opposite principles. Of old, when 
God wrought wonders, to extort from Egypt and her 
reluctant king the liberation of His own chosen tribes, 
the magicians of the land would parody and thus rival 
the miracles of the Hebrew prophet. And thus it has 
been often since. The policy of Satan has still been 
to travesty, and, in that mode, to discredit the won- 
drous works and the illustrious benefits of Grod. "When 
Christianity, in her fresh youth, startled the nations 
by the splendor of her moral miracles in the reforma- 
tion of character and in the relief of sorrow, Julian, 
the apostate, an envenomed persecutor of the gospel, 
would reanimate the Grod-smitten corpse "»f ancient 



CHARITY. 207 

Paganism, by teaching the Pagan priests to imitate 
the moral blamelessness of christian ministers, and 
the Pagan worshippers to show the liberality and sym- 
pathy for the poor and suffering which were shown by 
the votaries of the cross. He would imitate and emu- 
late certain effects of the gospel, in order to disparage 
and replace it. So in later times, when Satan found 
Christianity overrunning the earth, he brought forth, 
in Antichrist, the fearful imitation and counterfeit of 
the true Christ. Popery was a resuscitation of the old 
Judaism ; — a local and ritual religion, with great truths 
retained on its creed, and worn as on its frontlets and 
phylacteries, but all of them interspersed with a more 
than Pagan sensualism, and a more than Pharisaic 
formalism ; and bringing into the temple of God 
another gospel, which is not another, and another sal- 
vation than that by grace through the Redemption 
that is in Christ. And so, what Pagan and Papal 
rivalry did in earlier times, we see Scepticism repeat- 
ing in these modern days. Under the name of Charity 
is installed mere Liberalism by many modern Reform- 
ers ; and by them and their disciples, Christ, instead of 
being a spiritual Emancipator, whose main work is 
with the soul and his greatest gifts for eternity, is 
represented as being but a Tribune of the people, aim- 
ing at and sacrificed for the political enfranchisement 
and the secular elevation of the degraded and suffering 
and down- trodden masses. But, as of old the coun- 
terfeits of Egyptian sorcery were soon exhausted, and 
sunk away, eclipsed by the brighter and vaster mira- 
cles that G-od's own hand wrought for his Israel, so 



208 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

will it be seen in the progress of the trial, between 
Christ as against the old Antichrist of Papal superstition, 
and the newer Antichrist of Modern Infidelity, that the 
rod of power, and the balm of healing, and the palm of 
victory, are all in the hands of the one Christ, — Infi- 
nite, All-sufficing, and Unchangeable, — the only Re- 
deemer and only hope of the race. And what is Char- 
ity in his Scriptures, and what are its relative honors, 
and its appropriate results ? 

I. The place. Charity occupies ; II. Its real nature; 
and III. Its Scriptural fruits, are the divisions under 
which we would group our present remarks. 

I. As to its place, the apostle here ranges it last, as 
the final and crowning grace. All those indeed which 
in his enumeration precede it, do also presuppose this, 
as necessary to their own existence, and are in the 
eyes of (3rod hollow and worthless without the presence 
and power of this, as being the informing soul, the pre- 
dominant motive of them all. Love is the fulfilling of 
the Divine Law, as guiding and inciting faith, and 
virtue, and knowledge, and temperance, and patience, 
and godliness, and brotherly kindness. It is brought 
forward last in our text, not as being in itself inde- 
pendent of, and in order of time, subsequent to those 
which the apostle has before recounted ; but here, as 
elsewhere, it is exalted, because of its power to keep 
in unison all the other graces, as the knot completes 
and holds together the garland ; and therefore, it would 
seem, it is last named. Thus, Paul in his epistle to 
the Colossians,* bids them " above all these things put 

* Coloss. iii. 14. 



CHARITY. 209 

on charity, which is the bond of perfectness ;" or, in 
other words, not only binding but perfecting, it is like 
the master rivet that holds together the chief beams 
in the framework and roofing of the edifice. And 
Peter, the writer of our text, has in his first epistle 
used almost the same language : # " and, above all 
things, have fervent charity among yourselves, for 
charity shall cover the multitude of sins." Like the 
uppermost mantle flung over all the other robes of the 
oriental dress, it adds the crowning dignity, and pre- 
serves them in their appropriate position. This its 
high and completing office, Paul elsewhere intimates 
in yet another form of language, when he describes it 
in his first epistle to Timothy :t " The end of the com- 
mandment," or its last, highest, and consummate re- 
sult, " is charity out of a pure heart and of a good con- 
science and of faith unfeigned ;" or as in his letter to 
the disciples at Rome in yet other words he states it : 
" Love is the fulfilling of the law."$ It is in his ad- 
dress to the Gralatian Christians represented as the 
secret source and band of all kindly offices among 
Christians : " By love serve one another ; for all the law 
is fulfilled in one word, even in this, ' Thou shalt love 
thy neighbor as thyself.' " k And Paul's Master, before 
him, had in like manner analyzed the law and resolved 
its varied requirements into the one great principle of 
Love ; Love supreme to the Supreme Grod, and to our 
fellow an equitable love, equal to that cherished by us 
for ourselves. 

* 1 Peter iv. 8. f 1 Timo. i. 5. 

% Romans xiii. 10. § Galat. v. 13, 14. 



210 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

2. But as if to guard against all possibility of any de- 
rogatory inferences, — as though love came in rank after 
faith, or as though it were a mere separate appendage, 
without which saving faith might exist, — the Holy 
Gfhost, which in our text has ranged it last, has in other 
passages enumerated it as the first of the graces that 
combine in one harmonious group, to constitute chris- 
tian character. So Paul in his letter to the Gralatians, 
and in that same portion of it just quoted, in indicating 
the cluster of graces and virtues that the Spirit pro- 
duces, says : " The fruit of the Spirit is Love, joy, 
peace." * So when Christ describes true piety, as in 
the darker and perilous days of the Christian Church 
it should suffer eclipse and decline, he sums up that 
piety in this one sanctified affection : " The love of 
many shall wax cold."t And Paul, on the other 
hand, when painting his own character, and stating 
the radical principle of all his lofty services and costly 
sacrifices, indicates this : " The love of Christ con- 
straineth us." X And when writing to the Hebrews, 
he gives it a station and rank before all other good 
works : " Let us consider one another to provoke unto 
love and to good works." § And Jude, when delineat- 
ing the disasters and snares of an evil time, bids 
Christians hold to this, for their safeguard, and the 
talisman of their spiritual life: "Keep yourselves in 
the love of God." II The text, then, in its order of the 
various graces of the true Christian, does not give 
their chronology in the renewed heart, or the order 

* Galat. v. 22. f Matt. xxiv. 12. | 2 Corin. v. 14. 

§ Hebrews x. 24. | Jude 21. 



CHARILY. 211 

of time in which they spring to birth. The regenerate 
soul loves God in the first pulsations of his new-found 
spiritual life ; and gratitude to the Redeemer who has 
bought him, prompts, early and continually, all his 
acts of obedience to Grod, and all his acts of kindly 
service to his fellow-man. 

3. But how is it related to, and distinguished from 
brotherly kindness ? We endeavored, then, in our last 
lecture, to show how Christ creates in his church of the 
regenerate a new spiritual brotherhood, and to show 
how this, though overriding, did not efface and extin- 
guish an earlier and natural brotherhood, combining 
together, in one confraternity, those who were espe- 
cially near and dear to us by the ties of friendship, 
kindred, and country. The principle of brotherly 
kindness, we supposed, was to find its scope in these 
two regions, — the sphere of the Christian, or spiritual 
fraternity, and the sphere of worldly, or natural broth- 
erhood. But are there none of our fellow- men found 
even beyond these spheres ? Ancient Paganism, indeed, 
scarce recognized the rights of such dwellers beyond 
the charmed circle of country and home, to any sympa- 
thy. In the old Roman tongue, the word for stranger 
and that for enemy were originally one, and, in the 
ancient British laws, the alien wrecked on their shores 
was regarded as bearing a forfeited life, and as being 
one that the first native who should meet him might 
butcher. Their hapless guest, made such by calamity, 
was to be their victim. Even Judaism, by its prin- 
ciples of isolation, (the fitting principles for the preser- 
vation of Divine Truth when that truth was yet a 



212 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

deposit to be guarded, rather than a message to be 
published,) was a dispensation which led many of its 
votaries to shut up their hopes within the sea-coast and 
mountains of Palestine. Christianity came to lift off 
from the human heart the narrow horizon of the coun- 
try and the household, and th© church, far as they 
crushed and confined that heart ; and to enjoin not 
only sympathy and regard for the friend, but for the 
enemy ; not only for the kinsman, but for the stran- 
ger ; not only for the countryman, but for the alien ; 
not only for the fellow-disciple in Christ's church, but 
it taught even the deeply- wronged martyr, forgiveness 
and prayer, for the persecutors that hated and wasted 
Grod's heritage and church. And the love or charity, 
thus broad in it's wide horizon of human sympathies, 
was derived from love and likeness to that Saviour 
whose expiring breath remembered his murderers. It 
was a love for the two-fold family of (rod : the family 
of mankind, of whom it is said, and " We are all his 
children ;" and the family of Christ, all named from 
Him their one Elder Brother. A true, though not a 
like regard, to each of these two households, — the one 
the lineage of the first Adam, the other the household 
of faith, and the lineage of the second Adam, — is re- 
quired of all Christ's followers, as based on love to 
the common Father and Creator of that two-fold 
household. 

But the chief distinction between the preceding 
grace of Brotherly Kindness, and the crowning grace 
of Charity, yet remains to be stated. Whilst the for- 
mer regards mainly the principle of fraternal obliga- 



CHARITY. 213 

tion to human nature, the latter finds its chiefest scope, 
and its highest object, in the filial ties binding man 
to his Father and Crod. Whilst the earlier grace 
bows down over the second table of the two given on 
Sinai, that bearing on its face man's duties to his 
neighbor ; the later, and nobler and mightier grace, 
stoops intently over both, but fixes its regard, most 
and longest, on that first table, the weightier of the 
two, where stand inscribed man's vast obligations of 
love, homage, and fealty to his Maker and Judge. 
And as Faith, the first named of all this choir of sis- 
ter excellencies, has its home and aim in Heaven, and 
fastens on the Veracity of the Grod of Heaven, as its 
warrant and sustenance ; so Love, the last named asso- 
ciate in the same band, knits hands with Faith, in find- 
ing, also, its chiefest aim and its chosen home in Heaven, 
attaching itself to the Excellency and Loveliness of 
the Divine Character, as does Faith to the Divine 
Truthfulness. When the Psalmist described the harmo- 
ny of the attributes of the Grodhead in man's wondrous 
redemption, he saw Mercy and Truth met together.* 
When the twain descended earthward, Truth found 
shelter in the home of Faith, and Mercy was lodged 
in the abode and heart of Love, or Charity, as she is 
variously called. Gratitude, and paramount love to 
God, coalesce, therefore, with love to man, in the es- 
sence of Christian Charity. And as God is before 
man in existence, and above man in worth and rio-hts, 
attachment to Him is the predominant element of 
this grace. The Love of God subordinates and regu- 

* Ps. Ixxxv. 10. 



214 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

lates all the outgoings of attachment in the renewed 
heart. 

II. We have thus prepared the way to discuss the 
true nature of Christian Charity, as distinguished from 
the semblances that usurp wrongfully its titles and 
honors. It is not, then, as the popular usage of the word 
would often make it, — bare almsgiving. This the Phar- 
isees practised with sound of the trumpet and at the 
corners of the streets, and yet had not true love either to 
God or man. And Paul declares it possible to give all 
our goods to the poor — not merely the tithe of the 
field, or the prunings of the vine, but the entire vin- 
tage of our means, to feed the impoverished ; and yet 
to lack true charity. When Romanism, then, teaches, 
as in some ages she has done, that bounty, in the 
form of large endowments for alms, might atone for 
sin, and was evangelical charity, the teaching was 
in plain oblivion or contradiction of an apostle's testi- 
mony. It was virtually Simony, proposing to purchase 
Heaven with silver and gold; an endeavor which, 
when made on the part of Simon Magus, was so 
sternly denounced and rejected. And as the poor-box, 
though our bounties should fill it, cannot contain all of 
a true Christian's charity : so, neither is this grace, 
as some other forms of error teach, a mere magnani- 
mous disregard of all doctrinal variances, and a fond 
and baseless assurance that all forms of faith are, if 
sincere, equally acceptable to G-od — and that He who 
is on high, hears, with equal regard, the praises that 
go up to Him as the Jehovah of the Christian Scrip- 
tures, and as the Juggernaut of Hindoo shrines of de- 



CHARITY. 215 

filement and butchery. No : the charity of the Scrip- 
tures loves the True God ; and as He is the (rod of 
Truth, it loves, ardently and without compromise, His 
truth — pure and one, and unmitigated and unadul- 
terated. Nor is evangelical charity connivance with 
sin. " Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and not suffer 
sin upon him, but in any wise rebuke it," said the 
law. When Eli dozed over this forgotten canon, and 
left the iniquity of his sons uncorrected, God awoke 
to vengeance, and the curse, long hovering, came 
down heavily on his descendants, in the day when the 
sword of Doeg devastated Nob, the city of the priests, 
bereaving it of all its inhabitants. The seraphim be- 
fore the throne flame with the love of Grod. But their 
charity, when they came down, the commissioned mes- 
sengers of Heaven to the cities of the plain, was not 
Indifference to Sin. It was fiery Vengeance. 

" Charity rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in 
the truth," is Paul's language in his matchless portrai- 
ture of this grace. And, as in the nature* of God, love 
to truth and holiness, is an attribute, having as its op- 
posite pole, hatred to falsehood and unholiness ; so, in 
holy David, and in each other true servant of God, the 
love of piety is necessarily detestation of impiety, and 
hatred for the workers of iniquity — not indeed detes- 
tation of their persons and souls, but of their practices, 
and principles, and influences. Paul, therefore, has 
his Anathema Maran-atha for those not loving Christ. 
He loves what God loves, and as God loves it ; and, 
as the love of God in Christ becomes the wrath of 
God against those rejecting Christ, so, the charity of 



216 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

true godliness is terrible, as well as lovely. It does 
not persecute ; it does not imprecate. It compassion- 
ates, and intercedes, and warns ; bat when (rod's 
mercy is exhausted, "and the misspent term of proba- 
tion closes in sudden and lasting night, charity breathes 
its Amen to the edict and sentence, as it goes forth from 
the lips of the Holy and the Grood, — bidding that his ene- 
mies go into the exile which they have chosen, and in- 
herit the ruin and perdition, deep and endless, which 
they have willingly and laboriously earned. 

For, the charity of the Scriptures is, first, love to G-od, 
the Creator and Source of all goodness, — to the good 
amongst men, as bearing his regenerate image, — and to 
the evil of our race yet on the earth, as bearing still the 
marred image of Grod, given in creation, but defaced 
in the Fall, and which may yet be created anew, in 
holiness, and righteousness, and truth. To the unre- 
newed, its love is that which we might imagine a 
friend to bear to the child, long lost, and far wandering, 
of some friend's household, whom he finds disguised 
in tatters, and corrupted in morals, among the strangers 
who have stolen him. It is a charity, that seeks to 
reclaim and restore ; that is not content with present 
degradation and estrangement, but seeks to win the 
prodigal from his captors, and to consign him again to 
a Father's home and training. 

It is, then, not irreligious, nor indifferent to all doc- 
trine, nor careless of revealed truth ; but, on the con- 
trary, springs from, and clings to, the truth as Grod re- 
veals it. It is, as Paul so significantly paints it, 
" Charity, out of a pure heart, and of a good con- 



CHARITY. 217 

science, and of faith unfeigned." The world would, 
on the other hand, confound with this evangelical 
grace, a spurious charity, that germinates from a heart 
not pure, a conscience not made good by the righteous- 
ness of Christ ; a counterfeit charity, that, instead of 
proceeding from " faith unfeigned," fraternizes with 
" faith derided and blasphemed ;" and that, instead of 
" rejoicing in the truth," simpers over error, and smiles 
complacently on the falsehoods that delude the world, 
that would discrown Christ, and people Tophet. 

Such, then, is Charity, — the love of the Father, and, 
in Him, of his creatures, embracing especially those 
that love Him, and resemble Him ;' but also extending 
its kindnesses, like that Father, " to the unthankful and 
the evil," for he sendeth his rain upon, and doeth good 
to, "the just and the unjust." 

III. And now, let us dwell upon some of the fruits, 
which Christian Charity (thus exalted in its place 
among the graces, and thus distinguished from the 
counterfeits and forgeries which would borrow its name.) 
might, and should display in the field of human society 
in the nineteenth century. Its root is, then, in another 
world. It is, first, filial towards God ; and then, frater- 
nal towards man, as the creature of Grod. Gushing 
from the Spirit of G-od, as received by the believer on 
the Son of God, and guided by the Scriptures of God, 
it flows forth over the race. As Hooker beautifully 
says of this charity : " The final object of which is, 
that incomprehensible beauty, which shineth in the 
countenance of Christ, the Son of the living God." 
Basking in that light, it beams its reflected glory on the 

10 



218 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

race whom Christ came to ransom, and to enlighten. 
And, as " good-will to men" was proclaimed by angels 
in announcing his birth, the banners of the gospel and 
the church bear that glorious motto to the end of time. 

Over the barriers, then, that hedge around the 
regions of spiritual brotherhood in the church, and of 
natural brotherhood, in friends, families, and nations, 
this charity finds its unchecked course ; and it is not 
indifferent to the distant, or the degraded, the unlovely 
and the ungrateful of the race. Human nature left to 
itself has much of the spirit of the clan. It would 
husband the golden talent of its sympathies, and 
wrapping them in the napkin of caste, or sect, or tribe 
or country, bury them to prevent their being lost or 
worn away, by rude attrition, by going forth into the 
open market of the world. True Christianity does not, 
on the one hand, with a false cosmopolitanism, once 
so fashionable, proclaim utter disregard to the claims 
of the nation and the home. It honors the domestic 
charities, the ties of kin, and the love of country, and 
the fond attachment of those like-minded in Christ, 
and set for the defence and diffusion of the same great 
truths. But, rising above these limits, it shows on the 
other hand, a true citizenship of the world, by hailing 
the needy, and the wicked even, as the subjects of its 
sympathies, and of its restoring tenderness, and of its 
availing and unceasing intercession. 

Much has, in our times, been said, and not unprofit- 
ably, of the distinctions physical and moral, which 
mark the several races into which Providence has per- 
mitted the descendants of one Adam and one Noah to 



CHARITY. 219 

be separated. These races have their marked peculi- 
arities. But it is a selfish and unchristian feeling 
that would dwell on the peculiar and divisive features, 
to the forgetfulness of the more numerous and more 
important features, in which all, — the Greek and the 
Barbarian, — the Celt and the Saxon, — the white and 
the black, — are alike ; manifesting a community in sin, 
and condemnation, and susceptible of a common and 
effectual recovery by the one great remedy. And 
especially does it seem unsuitable, to lay earnest 
emphasis, and an impassioned stress, on these differ- 
ences of national descent in Christian America. In a 
land, whose ancestral colonists were the emigrants of 
so many various races — and whose Continental Con- 
gress, in the war of their emancipation, met in a city 
dedicated, by the name which its founder had bor- 
rowed from the New Testament, to the memory of 
" brotherly kindness, " # — it seems unfitting, that the 
varieties of our lineage and ancestral stock should be 
made an argument for alienation and discord. Our 
colonial history and multiform origin seem rather a 
protest, as by anticipation, on the part of Providence, 
against aught which would part the Celt and the 
Saxon, or the Norseman and the Roman. In that 
variegated original, God seems to have pledged us 
to a wider sympathy ; — to a charity broad as the 
waters which our colonist forefathers crossed, and 
coextensive with all the climes where they had found 
their natal seats. But, besides these divisive tenden- 
cies, in the diversified lines of our descent, there 

* Philadelphia. 



220 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

are personal causes of isolation in our infirmities and 
sins, as well as in our varied education and tastes. 
We find it hard to keep the milk of human kindness 
uncurdled, when there is poured upon it ingratitude, or 
contempt, or injustice. To love the unamiable, and to 
feel a sustained interest in the brutish and degraded, 
is difficult except to confirmed and Christlike piety. 
An Eastern missionary, eminent for devotedness, once 
spoke frankly of the difficulty he found in repressing 
disgust at the personal filthiness of the forlorn and de- 
graded Pagans, with whom his missionary toils must 
daily associate him. And when wickedness becomes fu- 
rious, and Persecution repays with death the bearers of 
the word of life, can aught less than a Divine principle 
keep alive in the martyr and the martyr's friends, love 
and compassion for those who hate the truth, malign 
its friends, and would fain tread into the funeral ashes 
of their victim the faith which he professed ? Distance, 
and Dissonance, and Degradation, and Barbarism, and 
Persecution, how do they tend to cut off the currents 
of christian sympathy, and to chill the warmth of the 
heart once glowing with kindness, and to smite, as 
with ague and palsy, the outstretched and ministering 
hands of christian diligence and tenderness. 

But, over all these adverse tendencies, Charity 
triumphs by the grace of Christ, and continues seek- 
ing the good, temporal and spiritual, of those whose 
obdurate insensibility maligns and spurns her kindest 
offices. 

1. And, first, let us, among the appropriate fruits of 
Christian Charity, enumerate Foreign Missions. The 



CHARITY. 221 

Home Missions of the church were, in our last lecture, 
the subject of allusion, as being demanded by the laws 
of human brotherhood, in our obligations binding us to 
our neighbor and to our common- country. But, as to 
those more remote, and the inhabitants of other lands, 
which are burnt by the tropical sun or glazed by the 
eternal ices of the Pole ; owe we nothing to them ? 
Christ, our brother, and the brother, as the second Adam, 
of the entire race, said as He paused, with his face yet 
turned earthward, whilst His form already mounted 
heavenward ; " Gro ye out into all the world and 
preach the gospel to every creature, and lo, I am 
with you." Against such a charge and such a pledge, 
what avail all the objections, and excuses, and doubts, 
of those who disparage the modern missionary enter- 
prises of the Church ? Shall we live upon Him, and in 
Him, and yet refuse to obey Him ? Trust we in the 
pledge of His presence to the world's end, and yet do 
we hesitate to follow His leadings to the remote, the 
uncouth, and the barbarous ? Some deride the work, 
under the plea, that it is all sheer hypocrisy to profess 
sympathy, and gather contributions, for the idolater of 
the Antipodes, whilst here are shivering around us, the 
untaught and unfed, the ignorant and destitute, — the 
heathen of our own christian homes. The one work, 
indeed, should not be left undone ; but, should we 
never go forth to the Karen, whilst a hamlet or family 
remained yet unconverted in these United States? 
Then we might never go. For we suppose, that even 
Millennial times do not imply the conversion of every 
individual then tenanting the earth, here or in other 



222 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

lands. The principle of such an objection would have 
forbidden David to compose one psalm for the great 
congregation, long as there was left in his own house- 
hold, and beneath his roof, one unregenerate Absalom. 
Others murmur, that our missionaries carry to the 
heathen metaphysical doctrines instead of practical 
lessons, and that they would Christianize where they 
ought first to civilize them. Bat all experience has 
shown, that the readiest and surest — and in fact, the 
only ready and sure — way to civilize the savage, is to 
awaken by the truths of the gospel, and by its visions of 
eternal realities, — to awaken hopes and aspirations, that 
will make a change, in his temporal condition, seem to 
that barbarian both desirable and possible. And if the 
doctrines be, as you term them, metaphysical ; so is 
patriotism ; so is truth ; so is your own individuality, 
and your conscience, and your reason, — metaphysical. 
The God, who made the soul else than mere brute mat- 
ter, made the doctrines, that shall pierce and renovate 
that soul, something more than those material and 
physical truths, which you may tell on the fingers. As 
to waste of time, in communicating these great spiritual 
facts to the heathen ; it is no more a waste, than the 
roots of the tree are wasted and lost to it, — or the secret 
foundations of a house, idle expenditures to the builder 
and tenant, — because they are both under the ground. 
Your tree cannot have fruit or branches ; nor can your 
house stand against the wintry storms, without these 
sunken supports. And so the practical reforms which 
you require in the savage, must rest on these princi- 
ples of truth, — metaphysical as you choose to call 



C II A R 1 T Y 



223 



them, but revealed as we believe them, — that, rooted 
in the hidden soil of the heart, bear up the habits, and 
fruits, and framework of the outer life. But the 
objector has heard from some tenth transmitter of an 
uncertain rumor, that your missionaries are luxuriating 
in ease and princely splendor. If it be so, why are 
not more going out to share the spoil ? But, is it so ? 
Look at Williams, dying by cannibal violence in the 
South Pacific. See Jonas King threatened but recently 
with death by the violence of the rabble in Republican 
Greece. Read the story of the massacre of Whitman 
among the ferocious savages of Oregon ; and call you 
such sacrifices as these, — a living in ease, and splendor : 
and dare you impeach the martyr, of being but an im- 
postor, who subsists luxuriously on the gifts of the 
credulous ? No. The day has gone by for such re- 
proaches. Science, Commerce, and Freedom, all re- 
joice in the fruits of Foreign Missions. The Sandwich 
and the Society Islands are comparatively renovated. 
India's old idolatry totters. China has flung, reluc- 
tantly, the gates of her vast prison-house open to the 
feet of these pilgrim heralds of Charity, the mis~ 
sionaries of the Cross. The world is their debtor. 

2. But how shall we resist, there and in the home 
field, the rivalry of Romish error, and other forms of 
grave delusion ? Charity, here too, has her scope. She 
must defend the truth and scatter it ; but she may not 
persecute, however persecuted. She may rightfully ask 
in other lands the general toleration which she yields 
here. She may protest against the butcheries of the 
Inquisition, and the terrors of proscription and exile, 



224 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

which Rome, in various laws, imposes on those con- 
verted from her. So, against each form of religious 
delusion, like Mormonism, — against a rampant infidel- 
ity like that of Paine, — or a lambent and concealed 
scepticism like the philosophical liberalism of the 
times, — the Charity of Truth may and must witness, 
frankly and fearlessly ; but without hatred of the de- 
luded, without railing, and without revengefnlness. 
The Christian Church, and the synagogue of Satan, mis- 
calling itself also the church of Jesus, cannot symbolize 
together ; but, the weapons of the inevitable warfare 
must be spiritual, and be wielded in love and prayer. 

3. From the'victims of religious error, we pass next 
to the victims of want. Pauperism is a vast and com- 
plex theme. Some of the theories for its removal de- 
mand most grave changes, and social revolutions more 
thorough than any political revolution at which the 
nations have stood aghast. We believe it true, and 
that christian thinkers will yet generally admit, that 
the Political Economy even of christian nations, needs 
to be converted and baptized from its present irreli- 
gious state ; that the great principle of " Let alone," 
which many have proclaimed as a First Truth in Politi- 
cal Economy, is in some of its applications to the ac- 
cumulation and distribution of wealth, and to the re- 
lief of the impoverished and proletary classes, " a First 
Lie," that must be recanted, if there is to be safety 
for governments, or union and cohesion and sympathy 
in the various classes of the nation. It is, as some use 
it, but a metaphysical statement of Cain's argument : 
(! Am I my brother's keeper?" We believe that the 



CHARITY. 225 

notion that wealth is in itself prosperity, and that cap- 
ital has no other duties than self-preservation and ac- 
cumulation, are unchristian errors ; and that wealth 
needs other guards and restraints than it can buy, to 
be either safe for its owner* or a blessing to society. 

But, on the other hand, it seems plain that some of 
the remedies proposed for the removal of Poverty are 
chimerical and ruinous. Far as the Socialists and 
Communists of our time would obliterate the family, 
they seek to abolish a law of Clod which cannot be sac- 
rificed, without the wreck of Happiness, and Order, 
and Virtue. Far, again, as they teach men to over- 
look moral in their attention to material and physical 
wants, they wrong and degrade human nature, and 
must miss the happiness which they undertake to 
guaranty. For even a king on his throne — an Alfred 
amid fame and power and wealth, — needs something 
more than these earthly and transient goods, for the 
enjoyment of true happiness. He needs, as that great 
king confessed, pardon for sin, and hope in death, and 
a home in the eternal world. And if even monarchs 
need these, how much more does the poor man, amid 
his sufferings. If you fed and gorged him with the 
fullest supply of his bodily wants, and left him with 
a burdened conscience, a Saviour unknown, and Heav- 
en missed, he would be but a wretched and brutisr. 
Sybarite amid your plenty. The true Reformer musl 
still, as Christianity does, look first to the soul and its 
wants ; and in relieving man, the fallen and discrown- 
ed king, remember his former glory in holiness, and 
seek its restoration. 

10* 



226 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

But, on the other hand, christian charity requires 
that the body should not be overlooked. Christ him- 
self, while his first care was the Bread of Heaven for 
the immortal mind, cared for and wrought miracles to 
feed the hungering body, healed corporeal disease, and 
amid the tremendous and absorbing agonies of a 
world's atonement, this, the Redeemer of the world 
took thought, even on the cross, to secure for his be- 
reaved mother the earthly comforts of a home. It is 
not christian then, in our attention to the soul, to 
overlook utterly all provision for the wants of the 
bodily frame that shelters this soul. 

As to the proposal to abolish the household, we be- 
lieve that the yearnings of humanity, and the law of 
our Maker, have made the family as much a matter of 
necessity as is gravitation 'to the body. The mind 
and heart morally gravitate towards the household, 
and its isolation, and its repose, and you cannot extir- 
pate and strip off this moral necessity. As to the pro- 
posed communities, we do not see how they could 
avoid, within them and around them, the necessary 
destruction of individual independence. Those who 
would prefer separate and independent labor, would 
find themselves crushed by the competition of the com- 
munity ; whilst the community could not keep its 
members active and diligent unless despotic power re- 
sided in its chief, trampling down the independent ac- 
tion of the several dwellers in his domain. Again, 
were society all so gathered into communities, we see 
no possible provision for destroying inequality, compe- 
tition, and animosity as among these several groupes 



C II A R I T Y. 227 

or communities. They could not be all alike pros- 
perous, and content, supposing that any of them were 
so. It seems to us a surrender of personal freedom, 
and a wild endeavor to evade the inevitable and 
achieve the impossible. Inequality and emulation are 
inseparable from individuality, and any attempt to 
remove them, on the principle of the Community or 
Phalanstery, seems to us as hopeless as would be the 
attempt, to unlock the moon from its inferiority and 
dependence upon the earth and sun ; or like an en- 
deavor to create perfect equality of splendor among 
those starry worlds, which the will of their Maker 
formed unequal, "for one star differeth from another 
star in glory." 

4. We would observe, again, on. the bearings of 
Christian Charity on the repression of Crime, and the 
reformation of the criminal. We believe, that all or- 
thodox Christianity has been greatly maligned, by 
some now active in the amendment of the vicious, 
and the amelioration of the criminal code. The initi- 
ative was given, and the superiority in devotedness 
and usefulness has been always retained, by evangeli- 
cal Christians. John Howard, and Elizabeth Fry, and 
the humbler name of Sarah Martin, less famous, but 
not less devoted, may be quoted as proving this. But 
the views of some, who would fain persuade the 
prisoner that all his crimes are either the fault of so- 
ciety, or the result of his own cerebral organization, 
and that he is therefore more the subject of compas- 
sion than punishment, are most erroneous in principle, 
and have already borne their baleful fruits. Let us 



228 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

pity our fallen brother, but in playing the good Samar- 
itan, we need not flatter him. Crime is "not misfor- 
tune or fate. It is voluntary transgression, and self- 
chosen, self-created guilt ; and as such must be 
repressed. To make the penal code as little sanguinary, 
as will consist with the safety of society, and the sanc- 
tity of human life, we suppose to be required by the 
benevolence of the gospel. But, the abolition of all 
capital punishment, and the denial of right to war in 
any case whatever, are not to our minds scriptural 
truths. Crime needs the governor, and banded crime, 
if not otherwise to be subjugated, needs war to sub- 
due it. What the reading of the Riot Act is to a 
British mob, such we suppose the declaration of war 
for sufficient cause, to be to a nation — a resort sanc- 
tioned by the law of Heaven, and indispensable to the 
existence of human government, when all other reme- 
edies fail. Christian charity will abolish war, by les- 
sening in the hearts of individuals the love of wrong, 
that if found pervading multitudes makes war neces- 
sary. But, that war is in itself unchristian and sinful, 
we dare not say, when our Bibles say of the very 
Founder of Christianity : "In faithfulness doth He 
judge and make war." If war be sin, this is the 
blasphemous absurdity of saying, in effect, " In faith- 
fulness doth the sinless and Holy One sin." 

5. But the greatest fruit of the charity that Scrip- 
ture inculcates, is habitual love to Grod. The greatest 
of Beings, he deserves, as well as requires, the highest 
rank, and largest share in our affections. And, the 
presence of such supremest love to our Creator does 



CHARITY. 



229 



not abridge, but rather advances, exalts, and sustains 
our benevolent regard to our fellow-creature. Grod re- 
jects indignantly, as hollow and unreal, the professions 
of attachment to himself, that bring with them no 
feelings of kindness to man. " Whoso hath this 
world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and 
shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how 

DWELLETH THE LOVE OF GrOD IN HIM ?" " He that 

loveth not, knoweth not God : for Gtod is love." 
" He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his 
brother, is in darkness even until now." " Pure re- 
ligion, and undefiled before Grod and the Father, is 
this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their afflic- 
tion, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." 
An Abel's offering, however regular and devout in its 
compliance with (rod's requirement of a bloody sacri- 
fice, would have been valueless to himself and unac- 
cepted before his Grod, had he brought it with the 
same ranklings of enmity at heart towards his brother, 
as filled the bosom of Cain towards himself. Some 
religionists forget, or seem to forget this, and the world, 
taking advantage of their inconsistency, discredits the 
worth of piety, and the sincerity of those who make 
profession of it. 

But, on the other hand, it is a wrong, yet vaster and 
yet more irrational, to make kindly offices to man a 
substitute for all devotion towards Grod. Had an 
Absalom been the kindest of brothers, foreseeing, and 
in his quick sympathies, anticipating with the fullest 
liberality, and the most winning gentleness, every 
want, and every wish even, of the brethren and sisters 



230 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

whom God had given him, all this fulness of fraternal 
affection would not have constituted his character one 
of finished and symmetrical virtue, whilst towards the 
parent, David, the generous and fond father of himself 
and the entire household, his heart remained that of a 
callous and parricidal ingrate. Nor may we play the 
Absalom thus, with impunity, towards a better Father 
in Heaven, and then, turn to our human charities 
and sympathies, as a full discharge of all our moral 
obligations. Piety is essential to Virtue, and is the 
chiefest constituent of a truly virtuous character. 
And Godliness, as we have, in an earlier lecture, said, 
is essential to Happiness ; and man cannot, formed 
and endowed as he is, be at rest until he have ac- 
quainted himself with his God. 

Is Charity, in this its highest scope, and largest 
sense, but another name for G-odliness ? We answer : 
though allied and even inseparable, there is a distinc- 
tion between them. G-odliness is the practical result, 
on life, and intellect, and Divine communion, of this 
Love of Grod, or highest Charity. The latter is the 
controlling motive ; the former, the resulting action 
and fruit, which the energy of that motive produces. 
The Love of God, u shed abroad within the heart," 
assimilates the life to His will, imbues the spirit, read- 
ily and delightfully, with His truth, and gives to the 
worshipper filial access, and intercourse, and confi- 
dence, in his approaches to his Father. And here 
we are again met with evidence, that the relation of 
the several graces, enumerated and commended by 
the apostle Peter, in the text before us, is not a rela- 



CHARITY. 231 

tion of succession in time and date. Some measure 
of this Charity, or true and grateful love, must spring 
up, in the renewed heart, coeval with the first exer- 
cises of Faith. Grod, truly seen, is, to the unsealed 
eye of the regenerate soul, a Grod really loved. The 
Sun of Righteousness carries life-giving warmth, in 
the beams of his light. Of him, as of the natural 
orb of day, it may be said : " There is nothing hid 
from the heat thereof P The heart is made wakeful 
and glowing, when the intellect is thus truly illumin- 
ated ; and he who really discerns the Saviour, ardently 
loves Him. 

And this makes the doctrines of the Incarnation 
and Atonement so infinitely dear to the Church. They 
are not mere bodiless abstractions of the schools. 
They are the nutriment of the closet, and the sanctu- 
ary, and the death-bed. It is in them, that a God of 
awful and ineffable purity becomes accessible to a 
race revolted and corrupt. It is in the gift of His 
Son, that Grod commended his love to the world ; and 
Heaven itself, on the bestowment of a Redeemer, left 
in its own infinite and exhaustless exchequer, no richer 
boon. He is " the unspeakable gift," as Paul entitles 
it. And the argument, that above all others cheers 
the desponding heart, is that Grod having, freely given 
Christ, the greatest and richest benefit, shall He not 
with Him, " freely give us all things ?" In Him, the 
embodied and incarnate Deity has humanized itself, 
and made itself, so to speak, tangible, and intelligible, 
and approachable to humanity. We have, in the High 
Priest, one who can be touched with the feeling of 



232 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

our infirmities. And in this Christ, this divine embod- 
iment of Infinite love within a mortal tabernacle, the 
philosophy of the skies makes its direct and palpable 
appeal to the dullest and feeblest intellect. The child 
and the savage may not have the grasp of mind, and 
patience of attention, to follow out any long chain of 
argumentation ; but bring the story of Calvary before 
them, and every dormant power of the soul is aroused. 
" Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He 
first loved us." And stooping thus low, and coming 
thus near, why should He be refused the heart He 
claims, and which He claims only that he may flood it 
with peace — " the peace of Grod, that passeth all un- 
derstanding" ? And if we scorn and repel such ten- 
derness and benignity, pluck we not down on our own 
heads all the storms of a just, and implacable ven- 
geance ? "If any man love not the Lord Jesus 
Christ, let him be Anathema Maran-atha." 

And, as this Charity, or flame of Divine Love, kind- 
ling itself from the Altar on Calvary, is adapted to 
open and win all hearts ; so is it also, above all other 
motives, and principles of action, adapted to sustain 
an untiring zeal, an universal holiness, and an un- 
quenchable benevolence. Other and inferior objects 
cease, ultimately, to retain over us their original power. 
Ambition sits down, frustrated or sated. Avarice is 
disappointed of success, or finds himself as bitterly 
disappointed in his success : it does not bring con- 
tent or security. Pleasure palls on us, and, it may 
be, corrupts us. Knowledge perplexes ; and Fame 
dazzles, but bewilders us. The most prosperous of 



CHARITY. 233 

earth's most indulged children, are the victims of sa- 
tiety and weariness. An Alexander, amid conquests 
and renown, and power, and luxury, sighs for the joy 
of past conflicts, and for the task of subjugating new 
empires and worlds. So, in old age, how do earthly 
goods lose their capacity to fill the yearning and wea- 
ried heart. With dullened ear, and failing eye, we 
find that old recreations and delights have spent their 
power to refresh and to excite us. But the love of Grod 
is a spring whose elasticity is never lost ; and Calam- 
ity, and Sickness, and Age, and Death, leave this mo- 
tive power, but the stronger, unimpaired and fresh, 
amid the wrecks of earth and man. Ingratitude, and 
Failure, may chill the philanthropy that looks but to 
man for its reward : but he who, like Howard, kindles 
his torch at the flames of the sacrifice on Grolgotha, 
and opens his heart to the ingushings of Divine Love, 
may carry that torch, with unwasted brilliancy, and 
even with still augmented brightness, through all the 
fierce blasts of human scorn and ingratitude, and 
down into the darkest, dampest recesses where human 
wickedness and misery assume their most revolting 
and loathsome forms. 

And as this love is, in strength and duration, the 
mightiest of agencies on human character, so is it, also, 
the simplest. It throws dignity and splendor around 
any task, however lowly, and any station however 
obscure. As Luther was fond of saying : the maid- 
servant who sweeps the house, with Grod's love in her 
heart, as its controlling principle, is as really serving 
Him, and as surely accepted of Him, as the preacher 



234 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

dispensing His gospel, or the martyr defending His 
truths. Jesus, the Son of the Father, was as great 
when stooping to wash the feet of the frail, erring 
disciples, who were so soon to forsake him, as when, 
with troops of attendant angels, he rose, majestically, 
from the earth he had ransomed to his native heavens. 
And here is the grandeur of the morality of the New 
Testament. It brings the motives of the heavenly 
world, and the view and love of an Omnipresent (rod, 
to bear on all the petty details and wearisome task- 
work of life. It circumfuses Paradise, if we may so 
speak, around the beggar Lazarus, lying in sickness 
and neglected need, on the highway. Be I what I 
may, — poor, unknown, reviled and wronged, if I but 
love Grod : do I what I may, be it but the duty of 
my God-given station, performed with a (xod-fearing 
heart, — it matters little, what man may say, or think or 
do towards me. I am (rod's charge and child and heir. 
My prayer scales His heavens ; His eye marks and 
guides my weary path ; and this path leads me, 
through the tomb, up to His throne and home. Where 
is the philosophy that is thus sublime in its aspirations, 
and yet thus simple and practical in its hourly applica- 
tion ? 

Looking back on the way through which these 
sentences of the apostle have led us, how evident is it 
that the gospel has principles of permanent and uni- 
versal good, which need to be yet more evolved and 
illustrated, in the experience of the churches and in 
the character of each individual disciple. 



CHARITY. 235 

And in the sublime generalization of Scripture, 
which makes Love the fulfilling of the law, and from 
the contemplation, first, of God, the loving, redeeming, 
and all-lovely One, brings down our hearts to the 
wants and woes and sins of our race ; — and makes 
Heaven, the seat of sovereignty, to which Earth must 
look up, and the point of aspiration, towards which all 
life, all care, all joy, all fears and all hopes should be 
directed ; — how grand and yet how clear is the scheme 
of the gospel, in its provision for the wants, present 
and future, of man ; — and this, not only for man, as 
the suffering, sinning, and dying — but also for man, 
as the immortal, the heir of the resurrection, amenable 
to the judgment seat, and invited to, and capable of 
the bliss and glory of an endless Paradise. 

Till we love Christ, the first duty and interest of 
our nature is neglected. Do we love Him ? We are, 
then, pledged to the good of the race and the glory of 
God, not only in the world beyond the grave, but here 
in this world, the wayfarer's lodge of our pilgrim 
years. 

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these 
three ; but the greatest of these is charity. 



QVpp Cttbt*. 



APPENDIX. 



Note A. — Page 37. 

The language of P. Gluesnel upon 2 Peter, i. 3, is : " La 
Foi est la premiere grace, et la source de toutes les autres." 
This was extracted in the celebrated Bull Unigenitus, (so 
called from the opening word of its first sentence,) condemna- 
tory of his work and doctrines ; and for the refusal to receive 
which, so many thousands of the Jansenists suffered deprivation, 
imprisonment, or exile, or were denied the ordinary com- 
munion, and burial at death. This sentence of the comment 
forms the twenty-seventh Proposition of those one hundred and 
one, enumerated and branded by the Bull. How the Pontiff, 
claiming as he does to be the successor of the Apostle Peter, 
could place Q,uesnel under the ban, and yet leave untouched 
the apostle, whose chair he himself assumes to fill, seems to 
us a mystery. Less even than an expositor's inference, — the 
comment thus condemned, appears to be, in this case, but a 
mere paraphrase of the apostle's text. 

In the " Traite Theologique sur les cent-une propositions 
condamnees par la Bulle Unigenitus. 1720," forming two 
large volumes in quarto, an attempt, with much patient eru- 
dition, is made to defend the positions of the Bull against the 
strong arguments and censures, which, alike from the Scrip- 
tures and the Fathers, the Jansenists had brought to withstand 
the Papal Edict. When we find these last adducing, in sup- 



240 APPENDIX. 

port of Gluesnel's sentiment, texts like that from the Epistle to 
the Hebrews : " But without faith it is impossible to glease 
him : for, he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and 
that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him," it 
would seem difficult for any ingenuity to parry their force ; 
yet it is, through weary pages, attempted. And when, in ad- 
dition to the scriptural argument, the Jansenists brought their 
quotations from the Fathers, on whose authority Rome has 
laid such stress, as from Ambrose, (lib. de Cain) "Faith is 
the root of all the virtues ;" from Augustine (epist. 194.) " It 
is from faith that all righteousness takes its beginning : all 
merit owes to this its birth, and of it this is the principle and 
the root" (Tr. Theol. t. I. p. 559 ;) and from Gregory the 
Great, (Moral, lib. 2, cap. 46.) " The other children feast as 
at the house of their elder brother, whensoever the other vir- 
tues feed on faith ; for if faith be not the first-born in our 
heart, nought else that is found there can be good, however it 
may seem so" (Ibid. p. 562 :) it would seem to an unbiassed 
reader, as if dexterity were hopelessly employed, in endeavor- 
ing to reconcile such unquestioned testimonies of the Fathers, 
with the condemnation of kindred sentiments and language 
from the page of the good Jansenist. 

But the chief ground of apprehension to Home, was, that 
such views of the precedence and necessity of Faith, were in 
conflict with the doctrine for which Jesuitism contended so 
earnestly, — that of sufficient grace, supposed to be given to 
all men, even the heathen never receiving the gospel ; — a 
doctrine to which Pascal alludes so often and happily, in the 
Provincial Letters. The impugners of Gluesnel, and apolo- 
gists of the Pontifical Bull, held, that in the case of these 
we must suppose the presence of grace sufficient for their sal- 
vation, and yet we could not imagine the existence of Faith, 
where the gospel was not. They quote from Thomas Aqui- 



APPENDIX. 



241 



nas, " the angel of the Schools," as they call him, the argu- 
ment, " Now it may be that a man shall be brought up 
among wild beasts in the forest, and this man, in such a case, 
could not believe ; and consequently must fall of necessity, 
under sentence of damnation. This would be absurd :" he 
thence concludes that faith is not absolutely necessary. (Tr. 
Theol. ibid. p. 545.) But is not Faith more than a reception 
of the mere gospel ? Is not the acquiescence in any or all 
light coming from God, whether it be by Nature, Providence, 
or Scripture, of the character of Faith ? Would hot one so 
disadvantageous!}' reared as the person described by Aquinas, 
— if the mind were at all expanded — be, as his mind opened 
to the notions and glimpses of a God, manifested in any way, 
or in any degree to him, in his narrow and dark sphere — so 
far a believer ? And might not the Spirit, on a mind so situ- 
ated, work without the Scripture ? The cases, we believe, of 
such docility to truth in the Pagan, to be most rare ; but we 
cannot see their impossibility. And whatever the acuteness 
and depth of Aquinas, his inference from his illustration, 
seems hi irreconcilable conflict with the language as to Faith, 
already quoted from the Hebrews: Can any mind, in any 
dispensation, approach God or receive his teachings, except in 
the exercise of Faith ? He supposes his savage possibly saved, 
and salvation implies " coming to God :" is not the sentence 
from the Hebrews decisive, that from such " coming," Faith 
is inseparable ? For the principle of Faith leans to God — ex- 
pects from Him — implores of Him — trusts in Him ; the lean- 
ing may be blind, the expectation vague, the prayer broken, 
and the trust feeble. But it is, at least, a going of the hu- 
man soul out of itself for help to a God more or less distinctly 
discerned. 

To the Romish condemnation, on such grounds, of the Jan- 
senist proposition, we have, therefore, these two objections. It 

11 



242 APPENDIX. 

assumes for Grace a wider sense than that in which the New 
Testament employs the term ; apostles, it seems to us, using 
that phrase rather to describe God's gifts accompanying sal- 
vation, than the general bounties and lights of providence and 
conscience, granted indiscriminately and apart from the gos- 
pel. On the other hand, it assumes for Faith, a narrower 
meaning than that in which it is used by inspired writers, es- 
pecially in the instance already cited from the Epistle to the 
Hebrews. There it seems to take in all approach to, and trust in 
God ; whether, as He is sought, without revelation in the char- 
acter of the God of Providence, or, as sought with the aid of rev- 
elation, in the character of the God of redemption ; and whether 
the soul so trusting in and seeking him, come in lands and tribes 
unevangelized, by the darkling paths of nature, reason, and 
conscience ; or, in the broad daylight of the Bible, and along 
the opened pathway presented in the sacrifice and intercession 
of Christ, as by that Bible it is fully manifested to the inqui- 
rer. Christ would be in either case, the only Saviour ; but 
in the one, a Christ unknown, in the other, a Christ known. 
So, the heathen, perverting and rejecting the light which 
they have, are condemned for this. They " like not to retain 
God in their knowledge." This is their form of unbelief — the 
shape in which they refuse Faith, and perish by the lack of 
it, choosing to reject " what might be known of God," — in 
his ordinary works, and in the career of his providence. 

Taking the words Grace and Faith, in the proper and apos- 
tolical signification, we deem Q,uesnel's position that of the 
Bible, and the impeachment of it by the Bull Unigenitus, and 
by its defenders, to be one of the many and sad instances in 
which the Roman Pontiff, sitting "in the temple of God," 
contradicted his oracles, and thus, in the character of Anti- 
christ, " opened his mouth against God." # 

* Rev. xiii. 6. 



APPENDIX. 243 



Note B. — Page 56. 

Bengel, in his commentary, the Gnomon Novi Testamen- 
ts upon 2 Peter, i. 5, having traced the bond of connection, 
which unites the several graces enumerated by the apostle, as 
they lie in their direct order, then proceeds to illustrate the 
same mutual dependence between these several graces of the 
Christian character, as retraced in. their reverse order. Thus, 
as he proceeds to remark, the man having charity, will, in 
the manifestation of his brotherly-kindness, display it without 
partiality. And he who has brotherly-kindness will perceive 
clearly that godliness is necessary. The godly will not alloy 
with the debasing intermixture of stoical apathy, his 'patience. 
To the truly patient man, again, temperance will be easy. 
The temperate brings to every subject a calm, clear mind, 
and thus gathers knoiclcdgc. And knowledge guards virtue 
from being hurried away by unconsidered impulse ; Bengel 
using virtue in the sense of christian boldness or energy. 

With that condensed, epigrammatic brevity which so char- 
acterizes his memorable work, he then proceeds to intimate, 
rather than to unfold at length, the mode in which Unbelief, 
the opposite of Faith, has its train and banded company of at- 
tendant evils. " A similar relation of the opposite qualities 
prevails in the wicked. Unbelief begets Vice, &c." Com- 
pleting the series of which he thus indicates but the first links, 
we suppose that the sentence would proceed, somewhat in the 
order following. Unbelief begets Vice, and vice begets spir- 
itual ignorance ; spiritual ignorance fosters all intemper- 
ance and license, as the last produces a fretful and selfish im- 
patience, which in its turn, chiding man and murmuring 
against God, begets a hardened ungodliness. Ungodliness, 
releasing itself from the Supreme Parent, soon disowns the 



244 ATPENDIX. 

I 

human brotherhood, and becomes • inhumanity ; and inhu- 
manity spreads and deepens into an inveterate and absorbing 
selfishness, " hating and hateful," that "fears not God nor rp- 
gards man," constructing for itself out of the wreck of the uni- 
verse, a throne for the installation and apotheosis of its own 
consuming and destructive egotism. 

Or, in other words, it would seem that the man who with- 
holds a reasonable and filial Faith from God's statements and 
commands, enters upon a course, the legitimate and final de- 
velopment of which is, — isolation from society and man, as 
well as from Providence. Refusing God's truth, he claims 
ultimately for self, the prerogatives and rights of a God. The 
only possible alternative for us, therefore, is to allow the rule 
of his creation to Jehovah ; or to claim it for our frail and evil 
selves. If we choose the latter, we usurp, to be wielded by 
our own mortal incompetence, Jehovah's sceptre : — not only 
to his wrong whom we defy, and to our own wrong, whom we 
thus disinherit, but to the sorrow and injury of our fellow-man, 
and of the lower creatures, and of Nature itself— all which we 
necessarily learn to maltreat, and oppress, and pervert. With 
this train of consecpiences, it will be seen how " he that be- 
lieveth not is damned" not only by the righteous sentence 
of the Maker, Sovereign, and Redeemer, whom he scorns, but 
he is condemned, as well by the consciences of his fellow-sin- 
ners, whom he wrongs and degrades, and by the suffrages of 
the lower orders of creation, over whom he constitutes himself 
a reckless and selfish tyrant. " The whole creation groaneth 
and travaileth together," in the sublime language of the apos- 
tle, against such an offender. In casting off his own celestial 
allegiance, he forfeits, of right, and is sure to abuse, in fact, 
his terrestrial dominion. The " unjust steward" learns soon 
" to smite his fellow-servants," and embezzling from his lord, 
becomes cruel to his equals and dependants. 



APPENDIX. 245 

Another wide field of thought is opened in the suggestive 
pages of" Saturday Evening," one of the profound and elo- 
quent works of Isaac Taylor.* Differing, as we feel ourselves 
compelled to do, from some of the minor expositions of this 
very able writer, we must yet regard his observations with 
deepest respect. He has said of the passage in Peter, which 
forms the theme of these lectures, and to which he devotes 
four brilliant chapters of the work above named :f " We 
might well seek our illustration of the apostolic injunction by 
taking a view at large of Church History, and then we 
shall find, beneath the significant phraseology of the passage, 
a condensed but comprehensive caution against each of these 
prominent corruptions that have developed themselves in the 
course of eighteen centuries. They are readily enumerated, 
and may be thus designated : — 1st. Pusillanimous or inert 
faith; — 2d. The licentious abuse of the gospel ; — 3d. Afa- 
?iatical or haughty subjugation of animal desires ; — 4th. 
Anclwretic pietism ; — and 5th. Sectarian or factious social- 
ity. Thus our apostolic canon is seen to hold up, as in a 

MIRROR, THE HISTORY OF THE DEGENERATE CHRISTIANITY OF 
ALL AGES." % 

Whilst the devout Bengel, therefore, guides our thoughts 
to the influence of the absence of these traits, on the individ- 
ual character and well-being, the British Christian directs us, 
on the other hand, to the bearing which neglect, as to these 
apostolic graces, will have upon the welfare and virtue of 
Christian communities and churches, in their collective ca- 
pacity. To follow out either train of thought, at the length 
which the stores of individual biography and the annals of the 

* " Saturday Evening. By the author of Natural History of En- 
thusiasm." New York: 1832. 

f Chap. xii. xiv. xvii, xviii. \ Page 180. 



246 



A P r E N D I X . 



secular or ecclesiastical historian -would easily allow, would 
require another volume equal in size to the present. 

As in a later note we shall have occasion to remark, we 
cannot apply the term "virtue," in the limited interpretation 
which our gifted author has attached to it. Taken in the 
larger sense, which, as elsewhere, so here also, we believe, 
belongs to it : — Yirtue apart from Faith, or Faith severed 
from Yirtue ; Yirtue without Knowledge ; Knowledge with- 
out Temperance ; Temperance without Patience ; Patience 
without Godliness ; Godliness without Brotherly-kindness, and 
Brotherly-kindness without Charity, would each furnish chap- 
ters on the history of the individual man, — on the workings of 
national character, and on the annals of the Christian church- 
es, that, we can conceive, would be full alike of interest and 
instruction. 

For " Godliness," both in its own essence, and in its first 
constituent principle, "Faith," and in its last consummate 
and crowning result, or " Charity," is profitable for all things, 
and hath "the promise of the life that noiv is." Any just 
estimate of this " life that now is," and any close analysis of 
that "life," either in the isolated person, or in the societies of 
the world and the church, would bring out, to a Christian ob- 
server of any philosophical insight, the most abundant and 
irrefragable testimony, that the Maker of man's heart, and 
the Huler of the world's history, had been also the Legislator 
and Author of the Scriptures : in that volume requiring as in- 
dispensable to holiness, what all the experience of the race 
has shown to be indispensable to happiness. 



APPENDIX. 247 



Note C— Page G2. 

It is the remark of the Rev. S. T. Bloomfield, in his 
" Greek Testament with English Notes," upon this portion of 
Peter's Second Epistle, that " the hest commentators are justly 
agreed," in giving to the term here rendered, in our English 
version " virtue," the sense of " courage and constancy in 
professing the faith, amidst persecution and temptation. A 
signification frequent in the classical writers, from Homer 
downwards, and found in the Latin, virtus." This limited 
sense of the term is the one adopted also by Isaac Taylor, in 
his " Saturday Evening," who heads the chapter of his- work 
founded on the apostolic injunction, — " Add to your Faith 
Virtue," by the title, " Piety and Energy,"*' and defines the 
virtue as being " manly energy, or vigor ;"f or, again, as " the 
constancy and courage of manly vigor," the Greek word hav- 
ing, as he holds, "this specific sense. "$ In favor of a like 
interpretation of it, are the high and earlier authorities of 
Hammond, and Doddridge, and the elder RoSenmuller ; and 
above all, of that acute critic, and most devout Christian, the 
great Bengel, who, defines the word, as conveying the sense 
of such tone and vigor of soul, as the apostle in his First 
Epistle inculcates, when bidding the disciple to " gird up the 
loins of his mind." 

For deserting, however, this interpretation, and returning 
to that of the earlier commentators, there are various consid- 
erations. Dr. Bloomfield himself, in his larger exposition, the 
" Recensio Synoptica," has held an opposite view to that adopt- 
ed in his other and briefer work ; and this he sustains in the 
following remarks : — " Most modern commentators from Ham- 
mond to Pott and Rosenmuller, considering that several partic 

* Page 114. | Page 178. % Page 189. 



248 



APPENDIX. 



ulars included in the general sense of the term, are just after 
added, take in the more special sense, courage, like the Latin 
virtus. But this signification is unexampled in the Scrip- 
tures ; and the apostle elsewhere shows too little attention to 
logical regularity to allow us to lay much stress on the argu- 
ment adduced. Therefore, though this interpretation is ably 
supported by Hammond, Doddridge, Benson, Wall, Macknight, 
and Rosenmuller, I cannot consent to abandon the common 
one, Christian virtue, which is retained and well illustrated 
by Schleusner, (Lexicon.)" * And not only is Bloomfield thus 
inconsistent and wavering in his construction of the term, but 
the excellent Bengel, notwithstanding all his clearness of 
vision, and his characteristic strength of convictions, seems here 
to retract, in another portion of his commentary on the chapter, 
his adhesion to the sense of energy or courage. In enumera- 
ting the virtues that attend Faith, he takes occasion to allude 
to the opposite chain of vices that accompany unbelief. And 
out of the latter, or unbelief, he makes "Vice" to spring, just 
as the corresponding outgrowth of Faith is Virtue. Now, in 
consistency with his interpretation of the Greek word that 
follows Faith, the correlative term here to describe the first- 
fruit of unbelief, was "Fear of man," or the scriptural phrase 
for that weakness, which is the opposite of holy boldness in 
God's service. " Vice" is the opposite and correlative term to 
"Virtue," taken in the ordinary English sense of the last 
word, and with the idea attached by the older commentators 
and critics to this Greek term. 

Nor do the moderns go, universally, into the views of 
Hammond, and Rosenmuller. Besides Schleusner above quo- 
ted, Bretscfmeider also, in his Lexicon of the New Testament, 
is found giving to the word in the present sentence the sense 
of " Probity, Uprightness." And Semler, who wanted neither 

* Rec. Synop. vol. viii. p. 698. 



APPENDIX. 249 

acuteness nor erudition, nor, on the other hand, leaned with 
any fondness of reverence to old interpretations, yet says, in 
his comment on 2 Peter,* — " Some explain it as being Forti- 
tude, to which I cannot agree : I should prefer the internal 
impulses and emotions of holiness, {internum motum et sen- 
sum quasi sanclitatis.) This I prefer, to the exposition of 
Beza, holy and virtuous conduct : for conduct has reference 
only to the mode of using outward objects ; but Peter speaks 
of the mind itself, and of its higher (moral) attainments." So 
too Wolfms, in his Curse Philolog. et Crit. in N. Test., whilst 
referring to some who prefer the sense of constancy and manly 
vigor, himself chooses rather to retain that of Virtue, or the 
love of Virtue, in the general sense of that term. Calvin's 
remark, in unison with the interpretation already quoted from 
his great disciple Beza, is : "I take Virtue to mean an up- 
right and well-governed life, for the term here is -4qstt] } and 
not Epeqyeia" The authors of the English Geneva version, 
accord with these their revered instructors evidently, when, 
in their note on this passage, they explain Virtue as " Godly 
manners"'' Adams, the quaint Puritan expositor of this Sec- 
ond Epistle of Peter, makes the Virtue here commended, to be 
in its general sense, or " in the latitude," to use his phrase, in- 
clusive of " all graces atid good endowments ." f 

To return, in this matter with Wolfms, Semler, Schleus- 
ner, and Bretschneider, to the more ancient interpretation, 
we find ourselves compelled by various considerations, that 
seem of preponderating and overwhelming force. The first 
is, that even in a Pagan writer on morals, the word would 
from the nature of the theme, receive the larger and more 
general sense. Much more would such seem the natural and 
necessary sense, in a book so essentially ethical as the New 
Testament. Again, the scriptural usage is against the more 

* Hal«. 1^784. p. 17. f Adams on 2 Peter. Loud. 1839. p. 64. 

11* 



250 APPENDIX. 

modern, and limited explication. Apply that sense to the 
same word as used by Paul in his magnificent adjuration :* 
" If there he any virtue, and if there he any praise, think on 
these things." Would not the substitution of " Courage" 
here, lamentably and manifestly weaken the force of the ap- 
peal, and mar the harmony of the sentence thus closed, with 
its introductory strain, — " Finally, brethren, whatsoever things 
are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are 
just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, 
whatsoever things are of good report ?" These instances in 
Paul and Peter are the only cases in which the New Testa- 
ment uses the word as descriptive of human character.! Pass 
from the New Testament to the G-reek of the Apocrypha, in 
the book called the Wisdom of Solomon : " Better is it to have 
no children and to have virtue ; for the memorial thereof is 
immortal : because it is known with God and with men. "J 
Its immortal record with God, decides in what sense the 
Greek word there was used. The definitions in Greek of the 
word by Hesychius, and by Cyril, in a MS. Lexicon at Bre- 
men, as quoted in Schleusner, Lex. Vet. Test., are of the same 
tenor and effect. And the contexture which we have endeav- 
ored to trace out between the various graces as arranged by 
Peter in the passage before us, also forbids our acceptance of 
Energy or Boldness, as the fitting sense here. Between Vir- 
tue and Faith on the one hand, and between Virtue and 
Knowledge on the other, we see a close and natural sequence. 
But why Boldness should especially need Knowledge, or be espe- 
cially needed by Faith, does not seem to us, even with the ex- 
position of the excellent Bengel before us, as clearly made out. 

* Phil. iv. 8. 

f Other passages of the New Testament apply it to the Divine 
character and operations, in the sense of Energy. 
% Wisd. of Sol. iv. 1. 



APPENDIX. 251 

The later English expositors seem to have been, in this mat- 
ter, led astray, by the authority of Hammond. And his opinion 
of the passage would appear to furnish another proof of the jus- 
tice of the charge, which his Puritan and Non-conformist con- 
temporaries and successors brought against Hammond, — that 
of being dazzled and blinded by an overweening admiration for 
Grotius. This great scholar gives his candid acknowledg- 
ment that the word in Paul's Epistle to the Philippians, and in 
the Pagan icriters on morals (apad Philosophos) must be 
taken in its general sense, or rendered " Virtue." But he ar- 
gues, that here it cannot bear this larger sense, because many 
names of specific virtues, as temperance and patience, follow. 
And, therefore, Grotius thinks it must here be understood of 
Fortitude in the faith* He would thus distinguish it from 
its accompanying and subsequent graces. But would not the 
same argument require him to devise some newer and more 
restricted sense for Godliness, also, which, in its large, scrip- 
tural meaning, includes all the precedent and subsequent ex- 
cellencies of the christian character ? But if, as we think 
that a careful student of the passage must allow, various other 
of these traits, quite as much overlap each other, and Faith 
and Knowledge must, to a certain extent, include one anoth- 
er ; and so also Godliness and Charity, (in the highest sense 
of that last term, as the supreme Love of God along with an 
equitable Love of man,) do cover, both, a portion of common 
territory ; then, as we suppose, the argument of Grotius must 
fail. It would lie against other graces as well, whose defini- 
tion he does not attempt, on that account, to alter. And that 
it cannot be carried out uniformly, is a reason why this pro- 
cess of restriction and close isolation of each grace, should not 
be even commenced, by the interpreter. 

We adhere, therefore, to that opinion of Bloomfield which 
* Grotius. Annot. 2 Peter i. 5. 



252 APPENDIX. 

is found in the JZecemio Synoptica, and which is also that 
of the older scholars ; because, as it seems to us, the ordinary- 
application of the term, even by heathen philosophers, when 
writing on morals, its use in the Greek version of the Apoc- 
rypha, its sense elsewhere in the New Testament, and above 
all, the connection of the ideas in the sentence before us, leave 
no other alternative. 



Note D. — Page 93. 

Speaking of the illumination that should attend the latter 
and happier ages of the Christian dispensation, the elder Pres- 
ident Edwards has, in his History of Redemption, these 
words ; they deserve respect, as those of a thinker, eminently 
calm and profound, and whose acquaintance with Scripture 
was intimate. 

" It will be a time of great light and knowledge. The pres- 
ent are days of darkness, in comparison of those days. The 
light of that glorious time shall be so great, that it is repre- 
sented as though there should then be no night, but only day ; 
no evening nor darkness. So Zech. xiv. 6, 7 ; ' And it shall 
come to pass in that day, that the light shall not be clear nor 
dark. But it shall be one day, which shall be known to the 
Lord, not day nor night ; but it shall come to pass that at 
evening-time it shall be light.' It is farther represented as 
though God would then give such light to his Church, that it 
should so much exceed the glory of the light of the sun and 
moon, that they should be ashamed : Isa. xxiv. 23. ' Then 
the moon shall be confounded, and the sun ashamed, when 
the Lord of Hosts shall reign in Mount Zion, and in Jerusa- 
lem, and before his ancients gloriously.' 



APPENDIX. 253 

'• There is a kind of vail now cast over the greater part of 
the world, which keeps them in darkness ; but then this vail 
shall he destroyed. Isa. xxv. 7 : ' And he will destroy in this 
mountain the face of the covering cast over all people, 
and the vail that is spread over all nations.' Then all 
countries and nations, even those which are now most 
ignorant, shall he full of light and knowledge. Great knowl- 
edge shall prevail everywhere. It may be hoped that then 
many of the Negroes and Indians will be divines, and that 
excellent books will be published in Africa, in Ethiopia, in 
Tartary, and other now the most barbarous countries ; and not 
only learned men, but others of more ordinary education, shall 
then be very knowing in religion. Jer. xxxii. 34 : 'And they 
shall Teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man 
his brother, saying, Know the Lord ; for they shall all know 
me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them.' 

" There shall then be a ivonderful unravelling of the diffi- 
culties in the doctrines of religion, and clearing up of seem- 
ing inconsistencies : ' so crooked things shall be made 
straight, and rough places shall be made plain, and darkness 
shall become light before God's people.' Difficulties in Scrip- 
ture shall then be cleared up, and wonderful things shall 

BE DISCOVERED IN THE WORD OF GoD, WHICH WERE NEVER 

discovered before. The great discovery of those things in 
religion, which had before been kept hid, seems' to be com- 
pared to removing the vail, and discovering the ark of the 
testimony to the people, which before used to be kept in the 
secret part of the temple, and was never seen by them. Thus, 
at the sounding of the seventh angel, when it is proclaimed, 
1 that the kingdoms of this world are become 1 the kingdoms of 
our Lord and of his Christ ;' it is added, that ' the temple of 
God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple 
the ark of his testament." So great shall be the increase 



254 APPENDIX. 

OF KNOWLEDGE IN THIS TIME, THAT HEAVEN SHALL BE AS IT 
WERE, OPENED TO THE CHURCH OF GOD ON EARTH." Works 

of President Edwards, in Ten Volumes ; New York, 1829, vol. 
iii. pp. 405, 406. 



Note E. — Pa^e 135 



The remark of Bengel, as to the bond of connection, and 
law of arrangement, between the several graces enumerated 
by the apostle Peter in this passage, is, that " the order is 
rather that of nature than that of time ;" or, in other words, 
they are not classed by date and order of succession, so much 
as by intrinsic character and their consequent relation. He 
had introduced this remark by the sentence quoted as a motto 
on the title-page of the present volume : " Each several de- 
gree INDUCES AND FACILITATES THAT WHICH IMMEDIATELY 
FOLLOWS IT J EACH FOLLOWING ONE, ATTEMPERS AND PERFECTS 
THAT WHICH HAS PRECEDED IT." 

The rich and excellent commentary of this great scholar, 
was not in the hands of the present writer, whilst preparing 
the course of Lectures now issued ; nor had he, in consequence, 
the advantage of Bengel's criticisms, in tracing out the fillet, 
on which these several virtues of the Christian character are 
threaded together. It is with the deepest self-distrust, there- 
fore, that the writer would record his doubt, whether the 
former half of the sentence or motto thus derived from Ben- 
gel, presents as justly the controlling idea of the Apostle's 
mind, in the structure of this passage, as does the latter or 
concluding section of the paragraph. 

To the writer, at least, it has seemed that the purpose of 
Peter's argument and appeal was, not so much to show how 



APPENDIX. 255 

each preceding- grace originated the succeeding one, as to 
make clear how each succeeding one was required to guard, 
or as Bengel has expressed it, " to attemper" that which has 
gone before. The soul of the disciple was tempted, — so at 
least we apprehend the thought of the apostle, or rather of the 
Infinite and Infallible Spirit through him — to pause at each 
step of attainment, as though that step were final and con- 
summate. It was his interest to see how each virtue, if thus 
accepted as a resting-place, involved a coming short of the 
glorious goal ; and how a Christian entircness and fulness of 
character required, that to guard the preceding grace from 
isolation and excess, it should have the addition and counter- 
poise of the grace next folio whig. 

Faith, then, being as Bengel remarks, the gift of God, and 
not therefore, according to him, recounted among the graces 
which man is here required to " add" "minister" or " sup- 
ply ;"* there follow seven graces, or fruits of the Spirit, making 
up a choir or band, of which the circle begins with Faith, and 
is rounded and ended by Charity. These graces man is com- 
manded, as the regenerate disciple and servant of the Holy 
Ghost, to supply, so that the one may carry forward the work, 
and complete the deficiencies of the other going before it. 

All human systems of morality have betrayed this inherent 
weakness, and this immedicable partiality of the unregenerate 

* If the great theologian and expositor intended to assert that be- 
cause Faith is a boon from Heaven, it is not therefore a duty required 
of each man, to whom God's truth comes, his sentiment can hardly re- 
ceive our assent. For each other grace, which the disciple is here bid- 
den to supply, is also the fruit of God's bounty. Grace has its very 
name from the favor or bounteousness of God. Its origination in the 
free love of God the sovereign, towards man the rebel, does not destroy 
man's obligations to exercise it. But men arc condemned before God, 
because they believe not, at the same time evading thus a duty, and 
Bpurning a favor. 



256 APPENDIX. 

mind, against which Peter here cautions us ; and their virtues 
have been isolated, and have owed their prominence and bril- 
liancy, to use language already quoted from Isaac Taylor, " to 
the spoliation of some spurned and forgotten qualities." He 
has in the following terms illustrated his meaning more at 
length : " Almost every excellence in the science of morals 
has been attained by sages — except completeness and consis- 
tency : the completeness and consistency of its morality is the 
peculiar praise of the ethics which the Bible has taught. 
Often, if we might so speak, the strength of the materials of 
six parts of morality have been brought together, wherewith 
to construct a seventh part ; and so much of magnificence 
and elevation has, by this means, been obtained for the single 
virtue, whether it were fortitude, courage, patriotism, or be- 
neficence, that mankind, in their admiration, have forgotten 
the cost at which it has been produced."^ 

And this tendency to pamper single virtues on the slaugh- 
ter and ruin of others, to create what we may call a system 
of moral primogeniture, confiscating the substance of the sister 
graces to enrich some single heiress amongst them, has not 
been at once or entirely overcome, amongst those receiving the 
full and symmetrical code of morals presented by Divine Rev- 
elation. The Jew was accused, under the older economy, of 
being "partial in God's law," or, in other words, of selecting 
his favorite and easier precepts, and endeavoring to make his 
exaggerated zeal for these a dispensation from all obedience to 
other commands, quite as explicit, and often far more import- 
ant. The Corban vow was to shield an unnatural child in 
beggaring his parents under pretext of piety. And under the 
JN ew Testament, the same fraudulent disposition, — to select, 
as interest or inclination might prompt, our own favorite pre- 
cepts and duties, to the utter oblivion or avowed scorn of com- 

* Saturday Evening, p. 174. 



APPENDIX. 257 

mauds and obligations more unwelcome, — has manifested it- 
self within the enclosures of the nominal Church, and even in 
the hearts of true disciples. The description of christian sym- 
metry given by the Apostle of the circumcision, in this text, 
appears as a solemn protest, on the part of the God of Holi- 
ness, against this infirmity of man's nature. The lesson opens 
by requiring Faith, or that man should believe all that God 
has said ; and that lesson closes by demanding Charity, or 
that man should love even as God loves. 

A christian nobleman of Britain, Lord Lindsay, in a work 
which, though brief, has evidently cost its author much 
thought, and been elaborated from the results of a wide 
range of reading, has presented a theory, in which he sums 
up the designs of Providence for the race, and the consequent 
destiny of the nations. To his work he has given a title : 
"Progression by Antagonism,"^ which explains the sub- 
stance of his theory. He imagines that the different nations 
and stocks of mankind have developed certain faculties of the 
mind, disproportionately, and as in opposition or " a?itago- 
nism''' to each other. Without accepting all the principles 
or the conclusions of the noble scholar, a christian reader may 
welcome the main truth, that out of this Antagonism of one 
imperfect character to another, — imperfect also, but imperfect 
on some other side, — God has been deriving the "progress," 
and more perfect education of the race. To the main princi- 
ple binding, or to use the expression of Q,uesnel, " chaining'' 
together the graces enumerated by Peter, we should suppose 
the title of Lord Lindsay's work not an inapplicable one. 
Each new grace is antagonistic to the preceding one in the 
Apostle's classification, not as intrinsically opposed to it, but 
as its counterpoise and corrective, supplying its deficiencies, 
and counteracting its excesses. Between the antagonisms 

* Progression by Antagonism. London, 1846. 



258 



APPENDIX. 



thus supplied, the soul, renewed and God-fashioned by grace 
from above, oscillates, as does the pendulum between the two 
opposite ends of its arc ; and this perpetual antagonism supplies 
the requisite movement or " progress" in which the man goes 
on, from grace to grace. The moral pendulum has more 
than its two points of contrast, or antagonism, indeed ; and 
here the comparison fails. 

Adams, the Puritan, in his exposition of Peter, has endeav- 
ored to trace a close parallel between the, eight graces com- 
mended by Peter, and the eight beatitudes opening our Lord's 
sermon on the Mount. It is, however, rudely done, and* with 
some violence, as it appears to us, alike to the language of 
the Apostle, and to that of the Apostle's Lord and Master. 

All christian excellence is in its own nature homogeneous 
and one. In the controlling love of its God, and in a grow- 
ing assimilation to this Divine and Perfect Object of its love, 
its life — its essence lies. But the relations under which this 
Author of our souls, — the divine claimant of the highest af- 
fections of these souls, — has placed us towards our fellow-men, 
and the other inhabitants of His Universe, are many and 
multiform. In ascertaining the due balance between the 
several claims upon us of these varied relations, difficulties 
often occur. As the Spirit of God, implanting the Love of 
God, must supply the first impulse and the motive power of 
the moral mechanism of man's soul, so the Word of God 
decides the laws of oscillation, within which this impulse 
works. Those laws are variously stated, according to the 
fewness or fulness of the relations contemplated. 



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FOOTPRINTS OF THE CREATOR, 

OR 

THE ASTEROLEPIS OF STROMNESS. 

BY HUGH MILLER. 

WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS. 
IIOH THK THIRD LONDON E DIT I O N.— WI T H A MEMOIR OF THK ACTHCS 

BY LOUIS AGASSIZ. 

"In Its purely geological character, the 4 Foot-priTits' is not surpassed by any nvxtefls 
nrorkof the same class. In this volume, Mr. Miller discusses the development hypothesis, 
or the hypothesis of natural law, as maintained by Lamarck, and by the autlior of tho 
' V* ostites of Creation.' and has subjected it, iu its geological aspect, to the most rigorotu 
examination. He has stripped even of its semblance of "truth, and restored to the Creator, 
is governor cf the universe, that power and those functions which he was supposed to hate 
resigned at its birth. * * * The earth has still to surrender mighty secrets, — and great rev- 
elations are yet to issue from sepulchres of stone. It is from the vaults to which anciea.i 
lfc has been consigned that the history of the dawn of life is to be composed." — Sorih 
British Review. 

" Scientific knowledge equally remarkable for comprehensiveness and accuracy; a sty to 
at all times singularly clear, vivid, and powerful, ranging at will, and without effort, from 
the most natural and graceful simplicity, through the playful, the graphic, and the vigor- 
ous, to the impressive eloquence of great thoughts greatly expressed; reasoning at once 
comprehensive in scope, strong in grasp, and pointedly direct in application, — these qual- 
ities combine to render the ' Foot-prints ' one of the most perfect refutations of error, and 
defences of truth, that ever exact science has produced." — Free Church Magazine. 

Dr. lifCKLAxn, at a meeting of the British Association, said he had never been so much 
astonished in his life, by the powers of any man, as he had been by the geological descriptions 
of Mr. Miller. That wonderful man described these objects with a facility which made him 
ashamed of the comparative meagreness and poverty of his own descriptions in the "Bridge- 
water Treatise," which had cost him hoars and days of labor. He would give his left hand 
to possess S'ich powers of description as this man ; and if it pleased Providence to spare his 
useful life, he, if any one, would certainly render science attractive and popular, and do 
equal service to theology and geology. 

" The style of this work is most singularly clear and vivid, rising at times to eloquence, 
and always impressing the reader with the idea that he is brought in contact wirh great 
thoughts. Where it is necessary, there are engravings to illustrate the geological remains. 
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State Register. 

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read the ' Vestiges of Creation ' should study the 'Foot-Prints of the Creator.' This vol- 
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cies of natural science. " We expect this volume will meet with a very extensive sale. It 
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THE OLD RED SANDSTONE; 

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NEW WALKS IN AN OLD FIELD. 

BY HUGH MILLER. 

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A writer, in noticing Mr. Miller's "First Impressions cf England and the People," Is 
the New Englander, of May, 1850, commences by saying., "AVe presume .t is not ce&sa 
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etone ' placed himself, by that production, which was first, among the most successfsi 
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We are not extravagant in saying that there is no geologist living who, in the descriptions 
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poetic beauty of expression. What Dr. Buckland said was not a mere compliment, that 
4 he had never been so much astonished in his life, by the powers of any man, as he had 
been by the geological descriptions of Mr. Miller. That wonderful man described these 
objects with a felicity which made him ashamed of the comparative meagreness and pov- 
erty of his own descriptions, in the Bridgewater Treatise, which had cost him hours and 
days of labor.' For our own part we do not hesitate to place Mr. Miller in the front rank 
cf English prose writers. Without mannerism, without those extraA'agances which give a 
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possessing, for a rational reader, an interest superior to that of a nove*. ' -Dr. J. Pye Smith. 

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jttan's American Journal of Science. 

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render any subject popular. It is written in a remarkably pleasing stjde, and ceiiia^ a 
wonderful amount of information." — Westminster Review. 

*' Ii Mr. Miller's charming little work will be found a very graphic description of tha Old 
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McmtelV3 Medals of Creation. 

Snt Roderick Muechison, giving an account of the investigations of Mr. Miller, spoke 
jo the highest terms of his perseverance and ingenuity as a geologist. With no other ad?an 
tages than a common education, by a careful use of his means, he had been able to glTe 
himself an excellent education, and to elevate himself to a position which any man, in say 
sphere cf life, might well envy. He had seen some of his papers on geology, written 4 
style so beautiful and poetical as to throw plain geologists, like himself, in tne shade. 

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THE POETRY OF SCIENCE; 

OR, STUDIES OF THE PHYSICAL PHENOMENA OF NATUIiU 

BY ROBERT HUNT, 

AUTHOR OF "PANTHEA," "RESEARCHES ON LIGHT," ETC. 



NOTICES OF THE PRESS. 

• VTe know of no work upon science which is so well calculated to lift the mind from th« 
eriraitVion of the wondrous works of creation to the belief in, and worship of, a First Great 
Cause. * * * One of the most readable epitomes of the present state and progress of 
science wo have perused."— Morning Herald, London. 

" The design of Mr. Hunt's volume is striking and good. The subject is verv well dealt 
with, and tbc object very well attained; it displays a fund of knowledge, and is the work 
af an e.oquent au i earnest man."— The Examiner, London. 

"This book richly deserves the attention of the public. Its object, as may be surmised 
from the title, is to paint the poetical aspect of science, or rather to show that the deepe* 
one investigates the mysteries of nature— whether in the formation of a continent, in the 
orbit of a star, or in the color of a flower— the more awakened will be his wonder and hio 
veneration, and the more call will there be upon his highest powers of the intellect and the 
Imagination." — Boston Post. 

" It was once supposed that poetiy and science were natural antipodes ; and lo ! they low 
are united in loving bonds. Mr. Hunt lias certainly demonstrated that the divinest poetry 
lies hidden in the depths of science, and needs but a master spirit to evoke it in shapes of 
twauty."— Christian Chronicle. 

•'It may he read with interest, by the lovers of nature and of science.' 1 — N. Y. 2'ribune. 

"It is written in a style not unworthy of the grandeur of the subject."— N. Y. Eve. Poat. 

"The author, while adhering to true science, has set forth its truths in an exceedingly 
captivating style."— New York Commercial Advertiser. 

" "We are heartily glad to see this interesting work re-published in America. It is a book 
that is a book." — Scientific American. 

" From the arcana of science especially, has the author gleaned what may be properly 
termed her poetry, which will make the book one of the most interesting character to th« 
intelligent reader."— Christian Herald. 

" It is reallv a scientific treatise, fitted to instruct and enlarge the mind of the reader, bu* 
at the same time it invests the subjects it describes with the radiance of the imagination, 
and with the charming association of poetry. The book well deserves the title it bears, and 
is a Ueautiful illustration of the'poetic interest that belongs to many of the discussions ol 
the science." — Providence Journal. 

" Tt is one of the most readable, interesting, and instructive works of the kind, that w« 
have ever seen." — Philadelphia Christian Observer. 

"In this admirable production, Mr. Hunt offers a beautiful epitome of the physical phe- 
nomena of Nature, in which, from their ultimate facts, he leads his reader by inductive 
processes, to the contemplation of vast eternal truths. Though full of information, tha 
facts cited in his pages are not collected solely because they are such, but with true phllo- 
Bophical acumen, to build up the edifice ; and if curious or rare, they are selected merely to 
■trengthen the position in which they are placed." — Washington Union. 

" We anticipate a wide circulation for it in this country." — Albany State Register. 

"Tte scientific compass of the volume is large, and its execution is exceedingly fine an* 
Interesting. " — Z ion's Herald. 

" "Ws noticed this eloquent work, while it was in the course of publication. It is now on 1 
In beaatiful style, and makes with the notes, which are full and as valuable as the text, i 
vo.anie of nearly four hundred pages. The publishers could not have done the poets of thi 
land «. better service, than by thus supplying them with exhaustless materials, collected 
from all brandies of science,"and admirably arranged for their more substantial structure.' 
— Watchman and Reflector. 

"ncre we have an illustration of the true and beautiful, and how that they are alway» 
one. The mysterious laws of nature, and the phenomena by which thev are manifested, 
are brought before the reader in a way that enchants and improves. There is poetry i» 
acience, as no one may deny, after he reads this book." — Baltimore Patriot. 

GOULD AND LINCOLN, PUBLISHERS, BOSTON. 



THE EARTH AND MAN: 

Lectures on Comparative Physical Geography, in its Relation to the History 

of Mankind. 

By Arnold Guyot, Prof. Phys. Geo. & Hist. Neuchatel. 

Translated from the French, by Prof. C. C. Felton. — Withrllhtstrations. 

Revised Edition. 12mo. Price $1.25. 



" Those who have been accustomed to regard Geography as a merely descriptive 
branch of learning, drier than the remainder biscuit after a voyage, will be delighted 
lo find this hitherto unattractive pursuit converted into a science, the principles o« 
which are definite and the results conclusive ; a science that embraces the investiga- 
tion of natural laws and interprets their mode of operation ; which professes to dii 
cover in the rudest forms and apparently confused arrangement of the materials com- 
posing the planets' crust, a new manifestation of the wisdom which has filled tha 
earth with its riches. * * * To the reader we shall owe no apology, if we have 
Baid enough to excite his curiosity and to persuade him to look to the book itself fey 
further instruction." — JVori/i American Review. 

" The grand idea of the work is happily expressed by the author, where he calls it 
the geographical march of history. * * * The man of science w'll hail it as a beauti- 
ful generalization from the facts of observation. The Christian, who trusts in a mer 
eiful Providence, will draw courage from it, and hope yet more earnestly for the 
redemption of the most degraded portions of mankind. Faith, science, learning, 
poetry, taste, in a word, genius, have liberally contributed to the production of the 
work under review. Sometimes we feel as if we were studying a treatise on tho 
exact sciences ; at others, it strikes the ear like an epic poem. Now it reads liko 
history, and now it sounds like prophecy. It will find readers in whatever language 
it may be published ; and in the elegant English dress which it has received from the 
accomplished pen of the translator, it will not fail to interest, instruct and inspire. 

We congratulate tho lovers of history and of physical geography, as well as all 
those who are interested in the growth and expansion of our common education, that 
Prof. Guyot contemplates the publication of a series of elementary works on Physical 
Geography, in which these two great branches of study which God has so closoly 
joined together, will not, we trust, be put asunder." — Christian Examiner. 

" A copy of this volume reached us at too late an hour for an extended notice. Tha 
work is one of high merit, exhibiting a wide range of knowledge, great research, and 
a philosophical spirit of investigation. Its perusal will well repay the most learned 
in such subjects, and give new views to all, of man's relation to the globe he inhabits." 
Silliman's Journal, July, 1849. 

" These lectures form one of the most valuable contributions to geographical science 
that has ever been published in this country. They invest the study of geography 
with an interest which will, we doubt not, surprise and delight mnny. They wHl 
open an entire new world to most readers, and will be found an invaluable aid to the 
teacher and student of geography." — Evening Traveller. 

" We venture to pronounce this one of the most interesting and instructive" books 
which have come from the American press for many a month. The science of which 
it treats is comparativoly'of recent origin, but it is of great importance, not only oa 
account of its connections with other branches of knowledge, but for its bearing upon 
many of the interests of society. In Ihesc lectures it is relieved of statistical details, 
and presented only in its grandest features. It. thus not only places before us most 
instructive facts relating to the condition of the earth, but also awakens within us a 
stronger sympathy with the beings that inhabit it, and a profounder reverence for the 
beneficent Creator who formed it, and of whose character it is a manifestation and 
expression. They abound with the richest interest and instruction to every intelii- 
gerr. reader, and especially fitted to awaken enthusiasm and delight in all who ara 
devoted .s. the study either of natural science or the history of mankind." — Providenct 
Journal. 

'* Geography is here presented under a new and attractive phase ; it is no longer a 
dry description of the features of the earth's surface. The influence of soil scenejy 
and climate upon character, has not yet received the consideration due to it from his- 
torians and philosophers. In the volume before us the profound investigations of Hum' 
boldt, Ritter and others, in Physical Geography, are presented in a popular forin, and 
with the clearr.sss and vivacity so characteristic of French treatises on. science The 
work should be introduced into our higher schools." — The Jndcpandent, New Yorh 

M Geography is here made to assume a dignity, not heretofore attached to it. Tha 
knowledge communicated in these Lectures is c irious, unexpected, absorbii.g."— 
Christian Mirror, Portland. 



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